The Wildflowers of Northern Exposure

After a surprising handful of wildflowers at Devil's Tower, and again at Yellowstone, with some lupines and penstemons in between, Sheri and I were feeling pretty good about things. Spring was unfolding its blossoms in the northern U.S., and we were getting to see it. But then we got to the high desert of Washington and our spirits began to lose altitude. It was hot and dusty and void of much in the way of wildflowers. Then a strange thing happened: the interstate dropped down from the desert into the Columbia River Valley. It turned westward and crossed the river and began to climb through fields of lupines and balsamroots.

And it continued all the way to Roslyn.

We weren't in Roslyn for the wildflowers however; we were there for the Northern Exposure. Cicely, Alaska. Joel and Maggie. Holling and Shelly. Maurice and Chris and Ed and Marilyn. We were there for the ambience of a TV show that had gone off the air nearly 10 years ago. The wildflowers were sprinkles on our fudge.

Cicely, Alaska was, of course, the fictional setting of Northern Exposure; the characters were all aspects, in my Psychology 101 opinion, of the human psyche. The entire experience was magic. Visiting Roslyn, where the show was filmed, was another of those long dreamt-of things.

My wife and I ate at the Brick. We shopped in what had been Ruth Ann's store, as well as in a tacky little gift shop in what had been Joel's office. We posed in front of the Roslyn CafÈ sign. We peered in the window of radio station KBHR, where Chris once spun his records and read from Sartre and observed the universe around him. And we drove outside of town, where the wildflowers were in bloom. Let me tell you, we never saw those on Northern Exposure!

Not far out of town we found a small roadside meadow full of Chocolate Lilies (Fritillaria affinis) (also called Mission Bells or Checker Lilies), and lovely blue Camas (Camassia quamash). Both are lilies, and I think I've written about them before, but I've never written about them together, or growing together. Yes, they were a striking sight, the blue stars of camas mingled with the syrupy brown nodding blossoms of the Chocolate Lilies.

Chocolate Lilies range from southern B.C. to southern California, and east into northern Idaho. Camas grows from southern B.C. to northern California, east to northern Utah, Wyoming and Montana. A variety of Camas that grows west of the Cascades and the Sierra Nevada Mts. has been classified in the past as C. leichtlini, but is often now lumped in with C. quamash. The difference, apparently, is in the arrangement of the flowers.

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