Mount Fritillaria, Exploring Mount Constitution in Flowers
It is a cold spring day up on Little Summit, and the snow is beginning to fall diagonally and fast, slanted by gusts of wind. Adam and I are searching for Polemonium, a plant that was recorded in 2000 to be “not infrequent” in the rocky areas around this south-facing peak of Mount Constitution. We have the GPS point on a map and go traipsing around the rocky balds trying to find it. It feels like we are on a treasure hunt as we scramble up and down, looking into crevices and on top of rocks in the areas that are still open enough for flowers to survive between the trees.
It's not the first time we've searched for small plants on this big mountain in adverse weather. As ecologists, our work is to better understand a place by getting to know the plants and animals that live there, or have lived there in the not too distant past. Sometimes we go through old photos, or someone's field observations from the 80’s, but on the best days we go looking for ourselves- to see what is still there. Over the past few years we've come to know the summits, slopes and species of Mt. Constitution fairly well -- and that has given us an appreciation for this unique ecosystem and its history, and helped inform our recommendations for how to care for the meadows that remain.
Polemonium, also known as Jacob’s ladder, has leaves that are distinct in their shape – like a series of hammerhead sharks lined up in a row, or a ladder – and ruffly periwinkle blue flowers in the springtime. Though we scan the entire area, we are unable to find it. So we head back up toward the summit, walking across thick moss, passing deer beds under the low branches of Douglas-fir trees. On top of a rocky knoll, I see some scat right out in the open as if it is trying to make a statement.
“Who could this be?” I ask. It looks canine to me but there are no coyotes here.
Adam leans over and says in a matter-of-fact way, “Looks like a cat. See how it’s blunt on that end, segmented, only hair and bone, and hard to break open?”
As well as being a walking encyclopedia of plant names and characteristics, Adam is an expert tracker who teaches workshops on the weekends. I know better than to disagree on this topic. But I do mention that there are not any wildcats on Orcas Island – and if there were, the whole island would surely know. There are game cameras placed in various corners of the park and no land managers have ever mentioned the presence of cats.
We suppose it’s possible there are feral cats up on the mountain, though we’ve never seen one during our many days of roaming the meadows and forests of Moran State Park. I sense that we both want to believe there could indeed be a wild cat living a secret life up here on the mountain. What if? I want to pump my fists in the air, but it seems so far-fetched that I keep this hope tucked away.
* * *
Adam Martin is my co-worker and fellow ecologist, but he’s also much more than that. He is like a long-lost cousin or a younger brother. He is a relative from another time. Martin is not an uncommon name – there are a lot of us around – but the connection still feels special, like someone who shares the same birthday as you. Adam is well versed in Martin genealogy. As he explains it, two Martin brothers left France to go to Wales where one brother stayed (where his Martins come from) and one continued on to Ireland and settled on the west coast of Galway (where my Martins come from). With some stroke of luck and a shared infatuation with flowers, our familial paths reconnected in the San Juan Islands.
Adam and I have traversed many places in the archipelago looking at things. A few years ago we worked on a project where we were directed to “meander intuitively” in search of rare plants. Sometimes I find Adam face down in the moss examining the almost indistinguishable parts of a tiny flower while casually identifying a species of bird singing in a nearby tree: “Oh, cool, the olive-sided flycatchers are back.” Neither of us will ever be able to afford a big piece of property on the money we earn doing this work, but we have indeed won the lottery in some ways that do not go unnoticed by us.
Continuing our search for Polemonium, we find ourselves back on the high slopes of Little Summit. The snow begins to blow even harder and it gets difficult to see very far into the distance, though we can still decipher the small things right in front of us. As I watch the snow pelt the mountain, Adam leans over and exclaims, “Oh look – Packera macounii!” Not far from his boot is a small rosette of gray-green leaves growing right out of the rock by the trail. At first glance it looks like any other nondescript weed, but its thick powdery leaves with serrated edges make it distinct – at least to some. There are no flowers on this plant in April; Adam just recognizes it by its leaf shape. There are a few other clusters growing in these rocky conditions that seem an utterly unlikely place in which to find a tender green thing growing.
Packera macounii is one of a small assortment of plant species that are found in few other places in western Washington but on the rocky slopes of Mount Constitution. The closest other populations in the state are found in the southeastern portion of the Olympic Mountains. Also known as Siskiyou mountain ragwort, it is most commonly found by the place it is named for: the Siskiyou Mountains in southern Oregon. It is an example of what is called a disjunct population. Disjunct, or separated, but also connecting one place to another. In the swale below where we are standing is a swath of Hood’s sedge (Carex hoodii), a plant you’re more likely to see higher in the mountains of the eastern Cascades and intermountain west. Continuing down the rocky path lined with Packera, we hug closely to the steep rocks, searching. It is often in the steepest, rockiest places where tender plants are able to find refuge from the deer and still get enough light to grow.
“There it is!” Adam exclaims. He has found a single Polemonium growing in a rocky ledge about five feet high – just out of the reach of deer. I take his picture with it in the snowstorm. He’s cradling it in his hands with a surprised expression as if we have found a lost treasure, or a celebrity.
* * *
With an elevation of 2,400 ft, Mount Constitution is the highest point in the San Juan Islands and the second highest mountain on an island in the contiguous 48 states. Only Devil’s Peak in California’s Channel Islands is taller. In the Northern Straits language, this mountain is called Shepeliqw, (“shuhp-uh-leekw”) which translates as “sharp point head.” Adam and I ponder the mountain’s name more than a few times during our walkabouts.
The mountain’s English name was assigned during the Wilkes Expedition in the early 1840s. It was not named after the Constitution of the United States, as I had assumed for many years, but instead after the warship USS Constitution, by naval officer Charles Wilkes. Built in Boston, the USS Constitution fought in the war of 1812 against the British. Some islands, like Decatur and Shaw, were also named by Wilkes after naval heroes. Michael Vouri of San Juan Island says Wilkes “created his war of 1812 Fantasy Land” in the San Juan Islands.
Wilkes and company’s tour through the islands was brief. Their time here was cut short because another vessel in the expedition had run aground at Cape Disappointment, near Astoria, and they left earlier than planned to help free the ship. I would like to know how word traveled from the mouth of the Columbia River to the San Juan Islands in the 1840s, but this detail of the story remains vague. Because of the hasty departure, it is also not clear if he ever stepped foot on Mount Constitution or many of the other places that he named in the archipelago. By the end of the entire four-year expedition, Wilkes was despised by his shipmates and was eventually court-martialed for the mistreatment of his crew. A name hastily given by such a man hardly feels honorable to this mountain, which is a beacon within the archipelago and a place of refuge and reverence to many.
Adam likes to make fun of the name and says it sounds like “Mount Encyclopedia” or “Mount Homework” for its dryness and lack of significance to the place we have come to know and love. As we find more and more wildflowers hidden in rocky places and in woodlands, we propose other names to each other that reflect these plant species, like Mount Viola (because all of the violets) or Mount Fritillaria (for the leaves of chocolate lilies, Fritillaria affinis, still present).
It is clearly time for a new name for this mountain, and the choosing of the name should be guided by the people who took care of this place for thousands of years – not a man who mistreated his crew and likely never set eyes on a chocolate lily on the top of the mountain nor swam in the cool waters of Mountain Lake in August.
* * *
Our work on the mountain is to try to restore and enhance the meadows that remain – a daunting task in the face of non-native grasses, an overabundance of deer, and 200 years of fire suppression (putting out naturally occurring fires) and exclusion (not setting intentional fires).
As we walk through the open meadows that remain, there are piles of deer scat everywhere and their beds line the perimeter. This is where all of the action is: it’s in the meadows where you find the bees and the butterflies, the deer, and birds of prey. As we walk into the young forest directly adjacent to these open areas, we see countless meadow species persisting under the young trees, but without sufficient sunlight to bloom, and too many hungry deer mouths to feed. Species like yarrow, yerba buena, alliums, and violets. The leaves of chocolate lilies are everywhere.
It is important to note that meadow species do not generally travel into the forest without a disturbance such as fire. It is almost always the forest that travels into the meadow. We continue walking into the forest and the young trees get thicker and the understory becomes less diverse. We go from counting over 90 species to less than five. Trees are falling over in the rocky soil, a result of strong winds, shallow soil, and an inability to deeply root. It is indeed a hard place to be a tree.
“This is garbage!” exclaims Adam. I chuckle to myself because I know what he is saying and why (and there are not too many people who understand the dark humor we share about this beloved place). It is a sentiment we have formed after criss-crossing the slopes and rocks and forests countless times.
In a culture where trees are king, it can be difficult to talk about how they can also have negative effects on the diversity of a place. I look around at the relatively small conifers, so many of which have fallen over that it is hard to walk through, and see very few larger trees, and no stumps – remnants of the past that would tell a story of old-growth forests up here. In this forested area adjacent to the meadow, there are only small- to medium-sized trees, mostly of the same age, and many blown over on the shallow soil.
A common story in the islands is that all of the trees were cut to feed the lime kilns, which ran from about 1860 until the 1930s. Seventy years is indeed a long time to be burning several cords a day to turn calcium carbonate to limestone, but were they driving all the way up to the top of Mount Constitution at that time? It seems like an incredible effort to undertake and, if they had, there would still be large, decaying stumps in some areas along the summit.
Trying to imagine a forest 100 or 200 (or more) years ago is a form of forensics. And, similar to forest time, it is slow work. You may find a couple of clues a year, like putting together the slowest puzzle you can ever imagine. A plant here, a photo there, a lack of old stumps here, a study done 30 years ago.
There is a photo in Rolf Erickson’s book about the stone tower at the main summit that shows a wagon traveling down the south side of the mountain, with Eagle Cliffs on Cypress Island in the distance. The terrain the wagon is traveling over is all grassy meadow – not a tree in sight, and no stumps. It is so easy for us to step into a place during a moment in our brief human lives and think that it has always looked the way it does right now . But every place is a story unfolding in any given moment, over a much longer period of time than our own. It is a result of the past and the present, and if we look closely and are willing to accept that we really know very little, we can start to humbly put together the pieces of its history. Or at least we can try.
* * *
A few years ago, I participated in a program which teaches people to basically sit in the forest and be quiet. I was learning how to listen better, but not in a scientific way. I was learning how to sit in the forest and notice things – all kinds of things – without imagining how it should or shouldn’t be in my mind. It was three years after my mom had died of cancer, and one year after my child had developed a chronic, incurable medical condition. It was another cold day on the mountain, and I had been instructed to go and sit with the trees as if they were my friends. At the time, I felt trees were very familiar to me, but not really in this way. I followed the directions and went and sat among a crowded stand of small Douglas-fir trees in a rocky area along the Cold Springs Trail. Death was on my mind, and so was illness – as it goes in life sometimes. I wondered how trees experienced such things. Do they? I thought about how fire is a natural phenomenon and, also, that it could kill many of them if it happened here.
As I sat with them, I asked them silently, “So, how do you feel about fire? What if you die or your children get sick, or your mom dies? Will you be afraid of it if you see it coming up the mountain? Would you grieve the loss of your mother tree?”
Sitting on the cool, thick moss, I looked up at the trees and the tops were lit up by the sun and bouncing a little in the wind. The mood was… joyful. Effervescent, even. It was as if they were at a dance party with the music playing and the wind was the beat, and they were leaning into the moment. This exact moment. What I felt them saying was: “We are alive and the sun is shining. Look! The sun is shining, and our leaves are green against a bright blue sky! Isn’t it a-mazing?!”
I don’t know how to say this without it sounding overly simplistic, but it was also as clear as day to me. “If we turn to ashes, our ashes are still part of all of It. Oh, little somber human, don’t miss the joy of existence by thinking you are separate from everything else. We are not completely separate from the flowers that would come after a fire, and the bees that would find nectar for their young among them.” Yes, it was that same message again, delivered by dancing trees.
We do so much to try to remove death from our lives. Some people will go to great lengths to avoid the topic altogether. We put out forest fires, kill wolves and bobcats so they won’t kill the animals we have tamed. Some people feed the deer so they do not die over the winter. But Nature isn’t a sentimental, one-sided song. It doesn’t play that way. When you remove death from one area it tends to turn up somewhere else. It may be a quieter, slower kind of death, but it happens. You remove the “destruction” of fire and wolves and wild cats and you eventually get an eerie absence of flowers and food for the bees and the butterflies – and across the web it travels. And across time.
When we do land acknowledgements, we acknowledge the people whose land this was and who have been stewards of this place for thousands of years. It’s hard to fathom how long that has been, as hardly any of us islanders these days has even a grandparent living here. There is very little knowledge that has been passed down through recent generations of Euro-Americans about the natural history of this unique mix of geology and plant life tucked into the rain shadow of the Olympic Mountains.
As important as it is to acknowledge the people whose land we are on, isn’t it also important to acknowledge the land itself? What plants and animals were they in a relationship with? What did they take care of? What did they value? What has gone missing? What is still alive, but barely? What other species, like Polemonium and goldenrod, were common across the summit as recently as the 1980s but now can hardly be found? What food and medicine were plentiful? What stories do the trees and the Fritillaria tell us of the past?
Pieces of this story are all around us, and this kind of acknowledgment includes the past and the present, and perhaps an opportunity to do something about the injustices of the past as it is reflected in the plant life around us.
Many of the plant species that thrived because of indigenous land stewardship practices are now holding on in the rockiest places, marginalized like their former caretakers. We cannot go back in time or ever fully recreate what was, but we can acknowledge what the land is telling us, right now, in this exact moment.
The story of a forest or meadow can be partially recreated by simply counting the old trees and stumps in small areas and extrapolating based on those numbers. A study conducted by Peterson and Hammer in 2001, examining the historical density of the forests on Mount Constitution, estimated there were historically, on average, approximately three trees per acre on the sunny, south-facing slopes of the mountain. We estimate there are over 200 to 300 now. If we are to protect the diversity of the meadows and all of the pollinators and birds that rely on these open areas, we also have to discuss the removal of trees. It is the same story across the west: 200 years of fire suppression has resulted in overcrowded forests that pose an almost insurmountable task. But not impossible on a small scale.
* * *
About a year after our search for Polemonium, I am back at Little Summit looking south over to Cypress and Blakely islands. I can see as far as the lowland grasslands on the southern tip of San Juan Island and then beyond to the Olympic Mountains. After finding more records of flowering plants that were historically more common across the mesa-like summit, like sticky goldenrod, and pollinator surveyors bemoaning the fact that there is just not enough habitat (not enough flowers) for the pollinators in the park, Washington State Parks has agreed that some tree removal is warranted to protect not just the meadow on the south side of Little Summit, but to also restore a more open “woodland” structure on the north side. It is a great honor to work on public lands and in a place that is so loved by the people here -- both past and present.
On a foggy day in June of 2023, a crew begins work to remove the accumulation of fallen trees in the meadow, and to thin out the smaller trees on the north side of Little Summit. The trees that had fallen into the meadow were girdled about 10 years ago to increase light to the plants below – a recommendation made by ecologist Peter Dunwiddie, who has been a champion of native grasslands and a mentor to both Adam and me.
With each small tree removal, a little more light shines through to the understory and to the trunk of the trees still standing. The sun rays now hitting the bark of Douglas-fir trees may wake up the dormant buds beneath the bark and sprout new branches- rebuilding their spindly crowns. With each removal of a tree, the air flows and the trees have a little bit more room. There are a few remaining leaves of fawn lilies and violets that established in sunnier times, and the sun returns to them in small patches. By the following spring, fawn lilies will be blooming here for the first time in a long time. The northern aspect starts to look a little more like a mixture of eastern and western Washington – which is indeed what the San Juan Islands are – and why species like Packera macounii have continued to make their home here.
On the last day of eight days of work, the crew cleans up their tools, packs up their chainsaws, and heads down the mountain. I stand on the path taking it all in, a small movement toward what these forests may have looked like when chocolate lilies, Fritillaria, were common across the mountain. When fire was still allowed to move across the landscape. It’s a small step – there are still a lot of trees, way more than if 200 years of fire suppression hadn’t occurred – but the sun is able to filter through the trees now in some places, and that feels like an exhale.
Something white catches my eye and I look over just beyond the project area to a small opening above a rocky outcrop. There is a swallowtail butterfly flying in between the lodgepole pines and Douglas-fir trees, circling up and down and up and down, doing its mating dance. I scan the forest and then look back for the butterfly, but don’t see it there anymore. I then look straight ahead and my eye catches a flicker of white again in the trees. And there it is – in a beam of light created over the past two weeks. It has found a corridor and is flying right toward me through the trees. Time turns to taffy and stretches out as the butterfly’s black and white wings flap like slow clockwork, pushing down on the air to remain aloft. It’s antenna pointing right at me. What a strange sight it is to see a butterfly flying through the trees. But it continues to fly at my eye-level, as if looking right at me, then lilts just above my head. It passes over me like a soft whisper in my ear and continues up to the meadow on the south side of Little Summit, over to where the Polemonium and the Fritillaria hang on in the rocky, sunny areas of the meadow.
Acknowledgments:
Thank you to Jan Zeschky, Sam Bar, Erin Licata, and Adam Martin for your thoughts, insights, and contributions.