Alpine Wildflowers of the Rocky Mountains by Joseph F. Duft and Robert K. Mosely, published in 1989 with a 5th printing in 1996.
This guide to Rocky Mountain alpines presents brief descriptions of plants arranged in families. It provides a very brief description of the plant and any related cultivars. A page number refers you to the photograph section of the guide. The photographs show the plants in their natural growing location rather than in pots. The only problem I found with the illustrations is that some only show part of the plant. This prevents a person from having a good idea of the size plant they are looking at and makes field identification difficult at best. I did like the fact that plants which weren't being shown "life size" were indicated with a 1/4, ½, etc. to give you some idea of the real size.
Mountain Plants of the Pacific Northwest by Ronald J. Taylor and George W. Douglas was published in 1995 with a 2nd printing in 1998.
This is a very well written and well organized field guide to the plants of the mountains of the Pacific Northwest. You'll find a brief description of the growing zones for the west and eastern mountain slopes. The plant descriptions are divided into ferns and their allies, trees, shrubs and forbs, and grass plants and their relatives. If you can determine which of these broad categories an unidentified plant belongs to, your time searching for its identification will be greatly shortened.
I really liked the organization of the plant descriptions. You always find the written description and special notes about the plant(s) on the left side with excellent photographs of the plants on the right side. This way you aren't flipping from one section of the book to another to see the plant you just read about!
The end of the book contained taxonomic keys for identifying the ferns, trees and herbaceous plants. Next you'll find some line drawings showing you different types of leaf arrangements and flowers. A glossary concludes the book
If you live in the Pacific Northwest or simply visit there, be sure to have this book in your backpack. It will soon be dog-eared from frequent use.
