Warm Wilderness Nights and Wildflowers

There are many good books on the logistics of backpacking. that describe training, what gear to buy, what to bring along, how to handle yourself in the backcountry, and I will get around to most of these topics eventually, in upcoming articles over the next few months.

Chris Townsend and Karen Berger are my favorite authors of backpacking books. These two are very experienced long-trip hikers who have a knack for providing very useful and easy to follow instructions.

What I plan to include in this new column though, is not just the how to's of backpacking, but also explore why we go backpacking, what it is like when we are up there, and also the mountain environment in itself, for example, the warm wilderness nights and wildflowers that we have right now in my part of the country - the Colorado Rockies.

Well, most of us care about what is personal to us. And through backpacking, wild country becomes so. It can cause an unknown and mysterious and far-off wilderness to start to feel like our mountain home for a few days, due to our increased familiarity with it.

About a week ago I camped alone with my two border collies in a hidden grove of 100 foot tall spruce and fir, on a little knoll in a forest, above a mountain lake.

Personal is the way to describe how I came to know that landscape in my time there - every log and tree between my camp and the lake, the point a hundred yards over that was next to deep water where it never took more than an hour to get my limit of Cuthroat Trout, no matter what time of day I was fishing. The calm weather allowed me to leave my rainfly off my tent at night, to breath in the fresh evergreen-scented mountain air. I would lie on my back and stare up at the tall trees ascending to the stars, and the ghostly band of the milky way.

Wildflowers were beginning their peak bloom at the beginning of summer, and I examined red columbines and forget me not's and paintbrushes of red, yellow, and creamy white.

On the last night in camp I came across a Calypso, or LadySlipper Orchid, in the shade of the tall spruce above a lake cove. I walked around for near an hour to see if there were more, and could find only one other, before coming back to take another look at this attractive and rare wildflower.

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