Wild Rides and Wildflowers. Scott Abbott
species. Craighead, Craighead, and Davis’s Rocky Mountain Wildflowers, however, lists three dandelions that occur in the Rockies, and states that “close to 1000 species of Taraxacum have been described, but conservative botanists now recognize around 50.” Schreier is a lumper, Craighead and friends splitters. It’s that simple—once Sam points it out. I bought these guides expecting scientific facts. Instead, I get judgments, assessments, interpretations built on biases. “Truth,” Nietzsche wrote, “is a mobile army of metaphors.” I’m fifty years old and have known this for decades. Now I know it again.
I try to explain this epistemological rediscovery to Sam and he has a sage reply: “Truth is relative for folks comfortable with dissent and argument, but solid as concrete among ideologues.”
21 March, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos
A storm during the night has scoured the air! The sun burns with a rare clarity, north of the equator for the first time since the fall equinox. We leave civilization and climb the mountainside. Restraints slough from minds and bodies. We ride over the quartzite, past Johnson’s Hole, along the limestone ridge, not stopping to catch our breath till the trail meets the fire road. We look again at the umbel.
“I did some reading,” Sam says. “I think this is Cymopterus longipes (spring parsley)—because of the bluish green coloration of the leaves. If I’m right, in the next couple of weeks the floral stalk will raise off the soil several centimeters on a stemlike structure known as a pseudoscape.
Near the spring parsley stands another tiny white flower. “They’re fourmerous,” Sam indicates. “And see how each of the four petals is split in two? I’d guess them to be mustards, the Brassicaceae family, genus Draba.”
We are down on our knees, our faces inches from the ground, our asses pointed skyward. I take my reading glasses, sans earpieces, from my shorts pocket and hold them to my nose. The tiny flowers are delicate and beautiful. Like us.
“By the way,” Sam says, “I checked on the death camus we thought had been cropped. Came up with a couple of different stories. First, some people believe deer will not browse death camus. Second, some suggest deer browse on Zigadenus when it is young and tender and there isn’t much else to eat. They may be able to get by with this as long as they eat other forage as well. Valerius Geist—who studied with Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz and has become a wonderful biologist with a focus on large North American mammals—argues that the mule deer’s rumen and bacterial flora can detoxify plant poisons, helped by its large liver and kidneys. He also points out that overgrazing has reduced the abundance of many good forage plants, making way for death camus and other toxic species.”
We’ve ridden the lower section of the Great Western Trail a dozen times since it dried. Today we’ll try a higher stretch, a challenging single-track trail winding up the flank of Mt. Timpanogos toward two pyramidal humps that protrude from the mountain’s southwest slope: Little and Big Baldy. Bikers at Mad Dog Cycles call this semi-hidden trail “Frank”—a nonsense code name—hoping to keep down the number of riders.
Frank begins with an abrupt approach through overhanging oak brush, jerks up a steep, tight C-turn, thrusts up two linked chutes so rocky we call them creek beds (with shifting adjectives to suit how badly they’re beating us up), and follows a relentlessly climbing ridge for miles. It doesn’t really need a code name to keep riders away.
I can’t find a line through the loose rocks just above the C-turn, and in the second creek bed Sam loses his balance as well. We remount and pedal up the ridge as slowly as the requirements of balance allow. In a meadow where the trail flattens just a bit, we stop for a moment (this has nothing to do with how my lungs are burning) to watch six heavy-bodied, spindly-legged elk (Cervus canadensis) slip out of the meadow and over a ridge. Creatures rightly wary of our presence. Specters of beauty and grace. Can they admire our forms? Find humor in our two-wheeled contraptions?
Not far below where we ran into the toe of a late avalanche last spring, wet snow halts our progress. Clusters of pink and white flowers bobble on their stems at the snow’s edge. The blossoms are fivemerous and have five pink-tipped stamens. “Spring beauties,” Sam exclaims. “Claytonia lanceolata. What a nice find!” On that same snowy ecotone, we discover flat little organisms that remind me of Lilliputian lily pads made of salamander skin. “An ascomycete,” Sam observes. “It’s a beautiful little fungus related to the morels we could find here later. The fungal flora of Utah is not well known, and I don’t even know the genus of this beauty.” I’ll ask Larry St. Clair at BYU, one of my colleagues who has become an expert on fungi and lichens in the West.
Heading back down the trail, working our brakes now instead of our pedals, we hear unexpected voices. Two young bikers appear on the trail below us. We pull our bikes off the trail, respectful of the wheezing, perspiring, climbing riders. The scent of onion engulfs us. We’re standing in a patch of wild onions (Allium cepa)!
Having descended to the top of the final hill, an orchard stretching in orderly rows beneath us, deeply satisfied by this equinoctial adventure, we stand down and let the sun touch us. Sam’s body turns suddenly and I watch him listen intently. It comes again, the complex, liquid warble of a meadowlark (Sturnella neglecta). The lark, its fat yellow belly brilliant in the sun, perches on a tip of silver-green sage. It calls again and again, swelling and contracting with the effort. From an adjoining hill, another meadowlark answers, filling the draw with echoes as warm as the sunlight.
Sam’s standing form, silhouetted against the valley below, reminds me of early nineteenth-century paintings by Caspar David Friedrich. Responding to the new sense among German Romantics for the importance of the subject as it relates to objects of perception, Friedrich painted human figures from behind, their gazes turned to nature. “Nature,” Friedrich’s contemporary Schelling wrote, “is visible spirit, spirit is invisible nature.”
27 March, Orem, Utah
“Sam,” I say when he answers the phone, “the Salt Lake Observer’s out, and our first column shares the paper with Terry Tempest Williams’ ‘A Letter to Edward Abbey on the 10th Anniversary of His Death.’”
“You mean your first column,” Sam answers. “I’m glad none of my prose is up against Terry’s. There’s no way she’ll think I wrote any of that, is there?”
“Not a chance,” I reply. “She’s known you a long time. She knows you can’t put two sentences together. But get this, she tells Abbey things have changed since he died: “There is a new species that has inhabited Slickrock Country: Biker lycra siticus. It is everywhere on Porcupine Rim, White Rim, Slickrock, Sandpoint, the River Road, Behind the Rocks, wherever there is flat red rock or an incline or decline wide enough for a mountain bike’s tire, Biker lycra siticus is there.”
“Ah, shit,” Sam opines. “That’s a harsh judgment from a woman we’ve always been half in love with. Guess we’ll have to sell the bikes.”
“Maybe we’re different from the bikers she’s writing about,” I venture. “Maybe we ride more responsibly, more respectfully.”
“All I know,” Sam says before hanging up, “is that you’ll never see me in Lycra again. And I’m taking over half the column. This is too important to leave to your misperceptions and sorry lack of talent.”
28 March, Great Western Trail, Mt. Timpanogos
The male boxelder trees (Acer negundo) are boldly in flower now, extruded stamens drooping conspicuously from long reddish pedicels. While we sit in the grass at the top of our lower loop, we notice several early grasshoppers.