Colorado Wildflowers - Mt Falcon in May

2015:

Mount Falcon was one of five trails that I visited this May, which was an unusually wet month. After four years of taking pictures of wildflowers, I am still pleasantly surprised to find new wildflowers to add to my catalog. Some of them aren't especially pretty in my opinion - like the white milkvetch below.  This was the first year for me to see Snowball Saxifrage. It reminded me of Death Camas. I am also learning to distinguish plants that have been hard for me to identify in the past.

View of Mount Morrison & Red Rocks

Milkvetch - not sure what kind

Missouri Milkvetch

Snowball Saxifrage

Sand Lily

2013:

My husband and I went on a trail run on Memorial Day at Mount Falcon Park, near Morrison, Colorado. This is one of the open spaces we use every summer for trail runs. I consider it be be one of the harder runs we do because the Turkey Trot and Castle Trails from the East parking area are steep and hot. The parking lot was full by 9 a.m. so we had to park along the road.

We tend to do most of our trail running in the evening so we usually limit our runs to six to eight miles. Since it is three miles from the East trail head to a covered picnic table just before the Summer White House site, we usually run to the picnic shelter, then turn around and head back down. On Monday, we had all the time in the world to run, so we continued on the Castle Trail and then ran on the Parmalee Trail, which is also steep in places, but more forested. I was amazed at the number of wildflowers I saw on this trail run.  The flowers were a good excuse to stop and catch my breath!

White Flowers

At first I thought that the white daisy-like flower below was an Aster but the yellow center seemed too big relative to the size of the flower petals. After searching the words Fleabane versus Aster, I have concluded that this is a Fleabane daisy because the white part of the flower is almost fringe-like. This search introduced me to the Weeds and Wildflowers page of what appears to be a family website for a woman in Utah, Sandra Bray. Her wildflower photos are listed under several different habitats - high mountains, foothills, roadsides and ditches, marshes and meadows, rocks and sand.

Fleabane Daisy

Wild Roses

Spring Beauty Flower

Purple and Pink Flowers

Beardtongue or Penstemon is one of my favorite purple flowers. I saw many clumps of them at Mount Falcon. The Weeds and Wildflowers site noted above said that the meaning of "Penstemon" is five stamens. I also took a fuzzy picture of some light pinkish purple flowers called Stork's Bill. This is a member of the geranium family. I have a couple of clumps of Cranesbill geraniums in my yard.

Beardtongue

Stork's Bill

Yellow Flowers

I had another chance to photograph a yellow flower that I had been unable to identify when I saw it a couple of weeks ago. The blooms were not fully open in my first picture but I was sure that I would be able to figure out what is was from the leaves. Not really - so many of the wildflower websites only show the blooms. So I tried to get a close up of the blooms and my photo came out kind of blurry. The photo was good enough though for me to figure out that it is a Golden Draba by searching for a yellow flower that looks a bit like Potentillas. Many of the Golden Draba photos that I found online had quite different looking leaves than the one below, but the Encyclopedia of Life photo was dead on! The paler yellow potentillas were just starting to bloom. 

2015: So the flower I thought was Golden Draba also looks a lot like Fiddle Leaf Twin Pod.

Golden Draba or Fiddle Leaf Twin Pod?

Potentilla

Yellow Violet

Orange Flower 

The Foothills Paintbrush is the state flower of Wyoming. In previous years, I've taken photos of paintbrush in July and August. I took this shot vertically because I like the spiky plant behind it.

Indian Paintbrush