Mountainbells

Day 266: Embarrassing moment: I was telling Arnie that I had found Mountainbells in a new location, and he stopped me. "Mountain bells?" he asked, separating the words. "Campanula?" I stuttered and spit for a minute which prompted him to guess again. "Mertensia?" "No, no," I said, "Not bluebells, mountainbells." A few more frustrating minutes passed while I pulled open files in my mental database, and finally, I just gave up and blurted out the incorrect nomenclature, "Stenanthium, only it's not Stenanthium now. It's something else. Dammit!" The Latin gave him the identity of the plant, but neither of us could think of the new name. We finally resorted to looking it up on line: Anticlea occidentalis.

Poking around in seeps and cracks, it's not surprising that Team Biota turns up new locations for some of the Park's less common damp-environment species. Not too many people are willing to clamber up a slot to stand in a light but steady stream of cold meltwater aimed directly at the back of their collars in the hopes that there might be one more specimen of butterwort lurking in the shadows. Nor does your average wildflower enthusiast go on their knees in the mud or slip from soggy, mossy rock to  soggy, mossy rock on their bum to reach the base of a waterfall to investigate a blue bit which might or might not be something unusual. Discoveries of rarities do not often come easily or without some degree of sacrifice. If they were readily accessible, it's almost a given that they would have been collected by less scrupulous observers. No, the rare things in this world largely occur where no one goes, in the same way that the biggest trout in a river are most likely to be found hiding in a tangle of brush below an undercut bank in a spot only accessible through a forest of devil's-club.

But Mountainbells aren't so very uncommon. It's just that by the time I got to them, I was mud up to the neck and my shirt was soaked. There might have been a butterwort up there, but there wasn't.