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 “Alpine Flowers”. That’s because there are other posts covering other aspects of our visit. For now, I’m sharing the 57 photos from THIS Gallery. As one might gather from the title, this has to do with flowers . . . Flowers growing in 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.
I won’t bother naming all the flowering plants on this gallery since anyone interested can read the blog post or visit the gallery for that information, but here’s some general info . . .
“Alpine” is not specifically referring to the Alps, but rather to the area above the tree line (around 12,000 feet in Colorado. . . until the climate changes). It’s the elevation at which trees have too short a growing season. This may be due to low moisture, too low a temperature, or persistent snowpack. The alpine terrain is known as the tundra.
The photos in this gallery are typical of the growth found in this environment.