SmugMug Appreciation Sunday — No. 041

In brief, these posts serve to introduce new readers — and reintroduce regular readers — to photos from the early days of this blog and, occasionally, to photos from days before this blog came into existence.

As a superfluous reminder, we — Melisa and me — used to live in Colorado, and I took a few photos while we lived there.

Today, I continue with photos from June of 2012. Depending on how you count them, Colorado has a few mountains (53 or 58) topping 14,000 feet in elevation (4,270 meters), and a few of them (two) have roads allowing people — people like me — to drive to their summits. Pikes Peak is one of them Fourteeners, and Mount Evans is the other and the subject of this post.

The original post for these photos is HERE. Notice the post has the coda “Sub-Alpine Flowers”. That’s because there are other posts covering other aspects of our visit. For now, I’m sharing the 54 photos from THIS Gallery. As one might gather from the title, this has to do with flowers . . . Flowers growing below the Alpine Tundra.

Note: some are shared as large files so that interested readers can click and zoom in. Be patient since I don’t know how fast they‘ll load.

Adjacent to the Mt. Goliath Natural Area mentioned last week, there’s the Dos Chappell Nature Center. From the site:

Once you’ve viewed the exhibits, explore the nearby rock gardens and examine the small wildflowers in bloom behind the nature center. Experience an enchanted forest of old gnarled trees by traveling through the quarter-mile Bristlecone Loop Trail. The building, exhibits, and grounds are the result of a cooperative effort between Denver Botanic Gardens, Volunteers for Outdoor Colorado, and the U.S. Forest Service. 

All of the photos in this gallery are from around the nature center and nearby areas. The advantage of stopping here is that you get examples of flowers found on the side of the mountain without having to go look for them.

You can read the plaque, walk a few steps, and see the flowers . . .

. . . except those weren’t listed. However, a quick search had me discover that’s a Rose Crown plant.

The cultivated area offers nice arrangements, like these pines, rocks, and flowers.

The contorted trunks of dead trees also framed the displays, but I couldn’t tell if they’d been placed there or marked the location of once-live trees . . .

Not just here, nearing 12,000 feet, but also at higher elevations, it always amazed me seeing insects . . . but there are a lot of them. Colorado has a short growing season, so flowering plants bloom quickly and vigorously for a few months, so I guess insects adapt by also proliferating vigorously for a short while.

The flowers are named in both the blog post and the SmugMug Gallery (for them interested in that stuff).

Colorado flowers are usually easy to identify because several people have blogs dedicated to them. When I lived there, I had several sites I relied on to help me put names to blooms.

Yes, this gallery is mostly populated with photos of flowers . . .

. . . hence the name . . .

I also photographed some lichen . . . and anyone reading the captions might be confused by the names, especially if they have any botanic training at all.

For those not familiar with those names, you should check out the Devil is in the Details post (and the associated SmugMug gallery). I won’t elaborate because the rare person whose curiosity is stirred won’t need my prodding to move them to explore.

Anyway, here’s one of the lichen photos . . .

And for them intrigued by the mention of the captions, here’s the caption for that photo . . .

The cycle of life . . . upon mating, Common Mozaic Bronspots fungi and Chewedious BubbleeGomma remain conjoined and are used as a food source for Perrious Tanktop until nothing remains but a dark waste-substance.

Pre-American-Indian cultures used these blackened chunks to make a diarrhetic to counter the effect of eating mostly pine cones and pine bark. They would take these pieces, soften them by chewing on them for a few days, and then fashion them into suppository pellets.

Bullets not having been invented yet, suppositories then did not have their current familiar shape, but worked pretty well anyway . . . unless one laughed real hard, in which case they would be prematurely ejected. You learn something new every day.

Here’s the slideshow for the gallery. If you prefer, you can just visit the gallery by clicking on the link I provided above.

Note: the transition is set to 2sec, but — if you move the cursor anywhere within the photo — you’ll see a pause button on the lower left, and, once paused, you can use the left and right arrows on both sides of the photo to navigate the slideshow. This is especially useful because I included the captions.

If you click anywhere in the photo instead of the pause button, you’ll exit the slideshow and find yourself in SmugMug. You can then scroll through the photos or interact in other ways.

Slideshow of Mount Evans — Sub-Alpine Flowers Gallery — (54 photos)

That’s it. This post has ended . . . except for the stuff below.

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