Finally!

Spring has finally come to this part of western Montana and the first wildflowers are now starting to bloom. Everything here is about a month late this year.

Woodland Star ~ Lithophragma glabrum

Sagebrush Buttercup ~ Ranunculus glaberrimus

White Trillium ~ Trillium ovatum

Yellow Glacier Lily ~ Erythronium grandiflorum

Spring photo practice

Spring is just beginning here and I’m using the time to get in a little practice to assure the photos I take later on the remote trails will be of decent quality. The macro lens that I use inherently has an extremely shallow depth of field, so practice controlling it will pay off later.

Aperture at f/32

Aperture at f/3.5

Beginning again

The Buttercups that began to bloom just one month ago met sub-zero temperatures and heavy snowfall the very next day. Yesterday they began to bloom again.

Sagebrush buttercup ~ ranunculus glaberrimus

A second visit to Buttercup Ridge

There was a little sun this afternoon so I took advantage of it to re-visit Buttercup Ridge and found quite a number of buttercups in bloom in the customary 20’ X 50’ place on the ridge; none anywhere else around for miles.

 

I took two pictures of the following pair with different settings and couldn’t decide which I liked best.

Sagebrush Buttercups ~ Ranunculus glaberrimus

Precocious

For about a week now the weather here has been mild for this time of year (nights in the upper 20’s and days just above freezing) and on a hunch because there was a brief period of sunshine today, I made the short but difficult hike up to a favorite winter place I call Buttercup Ridge; a little earlier than in previous years.

The snow was knee deep in places on the climb up to the ridge, but when I reached the ridge top I caught a slight glimpse of yellow in a place between snow drifts and sure enough the first wild flower of 2018 was in full bloom.

Sagebrush buttercup ~ Ranunculus glaberrimus

It had a couple friends quite close too, lichens already in their fruiting stage:

Cup lichen ~ Cladonia pleurota

The next two photos show the ridge top itself. The first shows the view to the south across the Clark Fork River and in the second the little flower is barely visible in the lower left.

My timing was good. On the return I caught a shot of Baldy Mountain and the deep snow at its summit

and one of a snow storm sweeping in across some foot hills from the Coeur d’Alene Mountains to the southwest.

The incredibly hardy little flower will be covered in several inches of new snow by morning.

Buttercup Ridge ’17

Warm weather and rain have finally melted much of the snow at the valley level in this area and at long last I was able to visit a place, which for some reason hosts the first Spring bloom of buttercups in this whole region. A week ago there was a foot of snow on the ground up there, but today hundreds of buttercups were in full bloom on the tiny top of “Buttercup Ridge”.