Colorado Wild Flowers

I love to hike wherever I go, but I knew when we decided to hike above Boulder right after we arrived that I wasn’t going to be up to carrying my heavy birding equipment, not at that altitude and not at that temperature. So I carried my trusty Canon SX 60 HS, which I bought precisely for such hikes.

We saw a few birds but the 60HS is nearly impossible to focus on moving birds, so I didn’t manage to get any bird photos. Luckily, there were more than enough flowers to keep me busy. I’m definitely not as good at identifying flowers as I am at identifying birds, but a flower without a name seems just as beautiful as a flower with a name.

I’m always surprised by the wide variety of flowers I see in the Colorado Rockies. yellow flowers seemed to hold sway on this visit.

I’d never seen flowers quite like this, but they seemed to thrive in these hills.

They were quite different from this flower that looked like it would grow quite successfully in the Pacific Northwest.

I suspect I have seen these purple flowers in the Cascades,

but I’ve only seen flowers like these in the Mojave Desert.

3 thoughts on “Colorado Wild Flowers”

  1. So nice to see the wildflowers there in the mountains of Colorado. I lived in Boulder for four years (1981-85), and haven’t been back. This is a lovely reminder.

  2. >”…but a flower without a name seems just as beautiful as a flower with a name.”<

    I like that line very much, and think it applies to people to a greater than lesser degree as well, but it does bring up the matter of "What's in a name…", what is this compulsion to know the name of a flower and a bird, a woman and a mountain and a town.

    The power and need and intimacy of that. Fine subject for an essay!

    1. Bet you’d do a great job on that, Andrew.

      Not so sure that’s the way I’m heading, even though I definitely suffer from that compulsion when it comes to birds.

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