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Top Ten Parks for High-Summer Wildflowers
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| By
Ian Wilker
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| Alpine Islands in the Sky |
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 | Adirondack Park, New York |
Wander the loftiest summits of the Adirondack High Peaks and you'll encounter a stubborn breed of flora, clinging to a mountain home in a latitude long since abandoned by others of its kind. These"islands" of alpine-arctic plants are remnants of the last ice age; their adaptations to a colder, harsher planet make the mountaintops their only home south of the Arctic. For a while they can survive low temperatures and high winds, they're intolerant, it seems, of other disturbances — especially the footsteps of careless hikers. Atop Mount Marcy, Algonquin, and the other tundra-covered High Peaks, be especially careful to rock-hop your way around.
Adirondack daisies
The plants themselves are fascinating miniatures. They hunker in fissures in the rock, minimizing their exposure to wind; their blooms are often tiny flecks of bright color amid the grasses and lichens. Early in the season, look for the small white flowers of diapensia and the magenta of Lapland rosebay, a dwarf rhododendron; from late June through July you can find lavender-colored alpine marsh violet and white alpine bistort, along with saxifrage, bluebells, and mountain sandwort. The rarest of the rare, here in the East, is dwarf cinquefoil, a five-petaled yellow blossom.
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GORPtravel Editors' Choice: New England
| "Wildflower National Park" |
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| Great Smoky Mountains National Park, |
| North Carolina / Tennessee |
The Smokies are such a rich biological stew that they are pretty much aflame with different blooms from early spring to the first killing frost of fall. In fact, among botanists, this park is known as"Wildflower National Park"! The stretch from mid-June to mid-July is as good as it gets. Much of the park becomes overgrown with lush greenery, and immense rhododendron thickets — with brilliantly purple Catawbas and delicately light-pink rosebays — overwhelm all else in the higher elevations. Spiky, bright-red bee balm blooms along the banks of creeks; coneflowers, tall meadow rue, and joe-pye weed light the meadows; and in the steamy dells, ghostly-white Indian pipe and oddly coiled fiddlehead ferns hide in the shadows.
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GORPtravel Editors' Choice: Southeast
| When the Monsoon Comes |
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| Big Bend National Park, Texas |
With three distinct biomes within its borders — the lowlands of the Chihuahan Desert, the high piney country of the Chisos Mountains, and the riparian habitats cut by the Rio Grande — it's no wonder that Big Bend is an International Biosphere. But it's difficult to picture a desert place such as this as wildflower-friendly during the dog days of August.
But that's exactly the truth. July, August, and September are the rainy months at Big Bend, particularly in the Chisos Mountains — and life of all kinds revs into high gear. Big Bend's plants are adapted to make the most of whatever moisture they receive, and when the rains come many of them burst into bloom, carry out their reproductive business, and die — all within a matter of days. The rocky land sprouts vegetation. Insects buzz; toads croak in the moonlight; wildflowers germinate, flower, and fruit in a few short weeks; and humans savor the look and smell of moisture and growth. In the midst of desert vastness, you'll find yellow columbines in rocky canyons; maidenhair fern thriving in lush banks at springs; and goldeneye, creosote bush, ceniza (covered with pink and purple blooms), sage, scarlet bouvardia, and ocotillo in the southeastern part of the park.
| More South-Central Hot SpotsGuadaloupe Mountains NP has similar climate and elevation to Big Bend, and you'll find equally eye-popping blooms in the Hill Country to the east. A little further north, Missouri's Mark Twain NF protects a slew of Ozarks flora. |
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GORPtravel Editors' Choice: Texas
| Endless Prairie |
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| Badlands National Park, South Dakota |
Badlands National Park consists of nearly 244,000 acres of sharply eroded buttes, pinnacles and spires blended with the largest protected mixed-grass prairie in the United States. And while it may be the chance to explore the starkness of the badlands that draws you here, no summer visit should miss exploring the largest surviving prairie wilderness on earth, the Sage Creek Wilderness. This is mixed-grass prairie, with 56 recorded species of tall, mid, and short-grass varieties. Some 200 wildflower species, such as Missouri milkvetch and hood phlox, penstemon and purple coneflowers, are distributed throughout the waist-high grasslands. Bison, pronghorn, mule deer, wild turkeys, and sharp-tailed grouse inhabit the wooded draws and open areas, as do a variety of prairie songbirds, including the horned lark.
The beauty and resilience of the prairies that once spread across the heart of North America lies in its incredible diversity of species. There are more than 100 species of plants, and each is specially adapted to particular environmental circumstances — variations in temperature, precipitation, topography, and soil acidity. Well-drained soils will support drought-tolerant grasses such as western wheatgrass and blue grama, while just a short dip in the terrain away you might find little bluestem, a grass requiring more moisture. And woven into all of these grasses are a huge variety of wildflowers, from delicate irislike blue-eyed grass to blazing-red prairie lilies to the tall purple spikes of meadow blazingstar.
| More North-Central Hot SpotsGlacier's not the only high country here, of course — there are more alpine meadows to be explored in nearby Flathead, Stillwater, Lolo, and Lewis and Clark NFs. To the south are Yellowstone and Grand Teton's biological riches, while to the west are the wild fastnesses of the Bitterroots and Sawtooths in Idaho. |
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GORPtravel Editors' Choice: Midwest
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