Mount Rainier National Park by Justin Kern
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Friends in Green Mountain National Forest, Vermont, 2023
GIF: Bruce Morrow
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i’m the wind in our free flowing sails and the liquor in our cocktails
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Lily Lake on the edge of Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado
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Walk with me: Visit to a high-elevation red spruce forest. The red spruce (Picea rubens) forest on top of Red Spruce Knob, the ninth highest peak in West Virginia, provides a bittersweet glimpse back in time to the primeval beauty and solitude of such places prior to the arrival of the logging companies in the mid-Nineteenth to early Twentieth centuries. The loggers stripped the mountains bare and set in motion the massive wildfires that burned away everything, including the soil itself, down to solid bedrock. Almost a century later, the forest is regenerating and in some places, such as Red Spruce Knob, has regained the richness and vitality of a healthy boreal ecosystem.
From top: a view of Red Spruce Knob, in the far distance, from the Highland Scenic Highway overlook; Canada mayflower (Maianthemum canadense), a ubiquitous understory component of the forest, along with mountain woodsorrel, yellow clintonia (a.k.a. blue-bead lily), hobblebush viburnum, Indian cucumber, green false hellebore, and various mosses and ferns; yellow clintonia (Clintonia borealis) in bloom; pink lady's slipper (Cypripedium acaule); green false hellebore (Veratrum viride) on eastern hay-scented fern (Dennstaedtia punctilobula); and mountain woodsorrel (Oxalis montana).
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