Over the past two weeks, Maggie Gaddis has toured the state, with stops in Boulder, Estes Park, Gunnison, Durango and Chaffee County, to check on the status of wildflower blooms.
Her advice? It’s time to get out there and be amazed.
“My recommendation is that folks hurry up, go experience it now,” said Gaddis, executive director of the Colorado Native Plant Society. “The flowers are amazing. They’re just on this hyper-drive, super-track. I’ve got plants in my garden that have bloomed already that don’t typically bloom until August.”
In much of the state, where abundant spring moisture was followed by hot temperatures, wildflowers are blooming earlier than normal, Gaddis said. As for the high alpine environment where snowmelt continued into June, the peak should come in a couple of weeks.
“At higher elevations, we had a really strong snowpack, so the alpine plants are right on schedule,” Gaddis said. “I was on Pikes Peak a week ago and nothing was blooming. Last year on July 6, I went on the same field trip and everything was blooming. I think we’re right on schedule for alpine, high-elevation stuff, because the snow is just barely melting. So, mid-July is a great time for those alpine flowers.”
Her advice tracks with that of Nicola Ripley, director of the Betty Ford Alpine Gardens in Vail, which are located at 8,200 feet. Ripley said they are in full bloom.
“We’ve had a lot of moisture up in the high country,” Ripley said. “It’s been monsoon season here. The gardens are definitely peaking, particularly the wildflowers in the garden. We’ve had warm weather as well as rainy weather. It would appear that everything is either right on time or a little early.”
Hikers venturing into the higher elevations are apt to encounter snow and mud.
“If you’re looking for alpine meadows, in the next week or so I think you’d be seeing the peaks there,” Ripley said. “But if you want to get up onto the alpine ridges, if you’re going through north-facing areas that still have snow on them, you’re talking closer to the end of July or the third week in July before the little alpines are in peak. What you would call the sub-alpine meadows, the paintbrush and lupines that people like to see, anytime in the next couple of weeks would be a good time to go.”
If you’re interested in visiting the Betty Ford Alpine Gardens, admission is free but donations are encouraged. They’re open daily from dawn until dusk. The education center is open from 10 a.m. until 4 p,m.
In Front Range mountains, some wilderness passes are still snowed in, according to Whitney McCurry, a public affairs specialist for the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests. Those forests stretch along the Continental Divide from Mount Blue Sky to the Wyoming border.
“My understanding is that balsam root is blooming, columbine started popping off last week, larkspur and lupine already flowered out and are done,” McCurry said. “We’re seeing most blooms coming out around 10,000 feet now, 9,500, something like that.”
The Colorado Native Plant Society maintains a calendar of workshops, webinars, conferences, field trips and presentations about Colorado native plants, habitats and gardening on its website. The phenology, or seasonality, of flowers varies due to many factors including weather, location and elevation. For crowd-sourced information on the status of wildflowers, Gaddis recommends iNaturalist, which has an app and website that are to wildflower viewing what AllTrails is to hiking.
“If you are planning a trip to a place where you don’t live, the best way to prepare yourself is to look up the place you want to go on iNaturalist and see what observations are being made,” Gaddis said. “I go around the state. If I’m going to a place I don’t live in, I use the map function and look up the place. There’s all these dots on the map and you can look at all the things people have recently observed. That’s a great way to plan your trip, see what’s going on.”
