Twenty feet ahead of my knees were many Cascade asters on the left side of the trail. I decided I would work to them—on my knees—then take a short break. I adjusted my position and continued hacking at the encroaching thimbleberry with a hand saw, occasionally using loppers for their stems at the base. I was in the middle of a brilliant green, several acres, steep sloping meadow where the forest gave way to low plants.
I was not quite halfway up Lowder Mountain trail, which began at FS 1993, ending about 600 vertical feet above me to my right at the summit. Olallie Mountain was across the valley to my left or south, and I could see individual trees, consistent with old fire damage near the summit. We had a crew working over there logging it out. I set up a concomitant trip to Lowder because I wanted to get in the woods, my sore foot wasn’t going to tolerate hiking up Olallie, and brushing Lowder was as important as logging it out, since the couple hundred yard stretches of thick brush in each of several meadows was both difficult to follow and concealed holes of some so far undetermined rodent. I’ve hiked Lowder maybe ten times, and one specific, treacherous hole has always been there—hidden by brush.
I arrived at the asters and had to decide what to do with them. They were on the downhill side of the trail, but there was adequate room to hike by. I couldn’t see removing all with my hand saw or loppers, because frankly they were really pretty, so I removed a couple carefully and left the rest. In a couple of weeks, they will have gone to seed, their job done, part of which was giving me pleasure.
I don’t like removing flowers, but trail work requires it. I purposely avoided power brushing a few dozen trilliums last spring on the Middle Fork National Recreation Trail, although I still accidentally removed three. Trilliums take years to grow and flower, and I felt badly about my error. Three years earlier, I left a large false Solomon’s seal hang over a trail on Fall Creek, because it would have been criminal to cut that beauty out.
A few minutes after I reached the asters, I accidentally lopped off two tiger lilies, because with so many different plants encroaching, different size, different leaf arrangement, it was difficult to sort out which plant went with what stem. A little further there were two more over the trail. I didn’t cut those; I bent the stems and moved the lilies behind thimbleberry safely away from the trail. Their flowers can still be pollinated. It’s not in the manual for trail clearing, but flowers are flowers.
Western coneflowers appeared, and I slowed to make sure they were left alone. Their stem has a whitish cast, which I had not previously noted, although I never had been in the position—hiking through a meadow on my knees—to look to avoid cutting one. The brownish cone top with the green leafy bracts is a standout. I didn’t notice the green surround when I first saw these in the wet meadows of the Waldo Lake Wilderness years ago. I haven’t been back there since the Cedar Creek fire, but this day Lowder had many. The stems could also be bent so I could move the flowering top further from the trail. If I could find a similar flower nearby, I hooked one around the other. Coneflowers need hours of sunshine, perfect for where they were.
At lunch I saw some columbines and two deep purple flowers 20 feet away and below me. When I later walked to them, I discovered the purple was really a deep red of a columbine that was past its prime and fooled my sunglasses. False alarm. The bloom had collapsed, the colors darkened. Later, I saw a blue gilia, a small puffy flower with tiny blossoms and a thin stem. It was at a switchback near a broken log I wanted to push off the trail myself but was afraid it would land in the trail below and I would have to move it again. It would have to wait for the logout the following week.
Keiko came up to me during lunch and thanked me for saving the purple flowers—the asters. She had noticed them, too.
Boreal B[l]og 
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