Anne Elliott's photos with the keyword: Erythronium grandiflorum

This weekend is Canada's 150th birthday! Canada Day is tomorrow, 1 July 2017. Happy Birthday, Canada!!! Such a great country to live in and I am so thankful to be here and to have spent the last 39 years in Alberta. There will be celebrations all over the place and lots of people on the roads. Please drive carefully, everyone! To have the chance to visit Waterton Lakes National Park six days ago, on 24 June 2017, was such an absolute treat! This was an annual bus trip arranged by Nature Calgary, with the destination being different each year. To visit Waterton for just one day does make for a very long day, though - takes about 3 hours to drive each way, for a start. "With its merging landforms, connected ecoregions and its mild, moist, windy climate, Waterton Lakes National Park is an amazing meeting place for an abundant and diverse collection of vegetation. Despite it's small size (505 sq km) Waterton is graced with over 1000 species of vascular plants . Over half of Alberta's plant species are found in this tiny place. The park's four ecoregions - foothills parkland, montane, subalpine and alpine - embrace forty-five vegetation communities. Sixteen of these are considered significant because they are rare or fragile and threatened. Waterton also has an unusually high number of rare plants - over 175 are provincially rare (e.g. mountain lady's-slipper, pygmy poppy, mountain hollyhock), and over twenty of these are found only in the Waterton area (e.g. western wakerobin, Lewis' mock-orange, white-veined wintergreen). Over 50 species are rare in Canada (e.g. Bolander's quillwort, Lyall's scorpionweed, Brewer's monkeyflower.)" From Parks Canada website. www.pc.gc.ca/eng/pn-np/ab/waterton/natcul/natcul1/f.aspx We had two main stopping places in the park - the lookout at Maskinonge Lake and a longer stop at Cameron Lake, plus a bit of time in the tiny town itself before leaving for home. The views from all the places are spectacular. Luckily, we had beautiful weather all day. Actually, we weren't too sure if the road going through the mountains to Cameron Lake was going to be open. It was due to reopen the day before out trip and, fortunately, the gate was open. Once at Cameron Lake, we found an empty picnic table right near the beach, and ate our picnic lunch. We were able to walk along the forest trail that followed the shoreline on the right edge of the lake. This beautiful Glacier Lily was one of the plants we came across. At a certain point, one has to turn around and go back along the same trail. Cameron Lake is one of my favourite places in the park, with a beautiful view of the lake and a pleasant, flat walk through the forest. There didn't seem to be a lot of forest wildflower species in bloom - maybe we were just a bit too early for them. However, the huge, creamy white flowers of Bear Grass growing along the edge of the road up to the lake had everyone in absolute awe. The road is only narrow and our bus was huge, so on the drive there, all we could do was gasp in amazement, with no chance for taking photos. We asked our excellent driver if there was any chance he would be willing and able to stop at one of the very small pull-offs at the edge of the road on the return drive - and he did! He was expecting maybe five or six people would get off, but I think almost everyone wanted to get a close look at these amazing plants. Even the driver himself got out to look and take photos. He had apparently never been to Waterton before and had never seen Bear Grass. We noticed tiny Crab Spiders on two of the flowers; one was lying in wait and the other had caught an insect. These spiders don't construct webs, but camouflage themselves by changing their colour to that of the flower they are hiding in, and then they wait. We also saw several stems of Striped Coralroot orchid in the ditch by some of the Bear Grass. After spending a couple of hours at Cameron Lake, the driver took us back into town, as some people had said they wanted to eat there before the long drive back to Calgary. Others, including myself, would have preferred to have spent the time somewhere else, seeing nature and taking photos. However, we were able to walk to the lake's edge, from where we were able to take a few scenic photos - something I had been hoping for. On our way back to the bus, some of us called in at a very popular ice cream shop - we all agreed it was the best, tastiest ice cream we had ever had! A huge, single scoop of wild cherry in a waffle cone - what more could one want? Penny, you did a great job of organizing this wonderful trip for us all! I know a lot of work goes into setting up an outing like this, and we all appreciate the time and effort you put into planning this. Such a perfect destination for this year's annual bus trip! Pam, thanks for your company on this long drive - helped make it far more enjoyable!

It was a real treat yesterday to have the chance to go on the Ptarmigan Cirque Trail in Kananaskis, Rocky Mountains! The trail is quite steep, leading up to alpine meadows and amazing views over deep valleys, scree slopes, alpine meadows, and jagged, barren mountain peaks. We see different plants up here, of course; ones that we don't get in the city. The lovely yellow Glacier Lily, seen above, is just one of them. Today, I am letting my body recover before setting out on a day of botanizing tomorrow, returning to a lovely property near Millarville, south west of the city. We are so lucky being allowed to go back again, to record more of the plants, birds, insects, animals and fungi, etc..

I ended up with about three almost identical photos of this particular flower - these were the only photos of Glacier Lilies that came out on our day of botanizing at Arethusa Cirque on July 30th, ha. Val, I'm so glad you took a step and partly blocked the sun - obviously made the difference! Other common names include Yellow Avalanche Lily and Dogtooth Fawn Lily. Grows in subalpine mountain meadows, slopes, and clearings. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erythronium_grandiflorum Somehow, I can't find the list of 400+ items that I had added values to, ready to give to Customs when my 12 boxes arrive from England. I have searched and searched but just cannot find the file, so now, of course, I have had to start again from scratch!! Arghh!!!! This new list doesn't seem to have saved, either, but now I think I know what I'm doing "wrong". I opened a Word Document attached to a friend's e-mail, added all the guessed values and saved the document. Maybe you can't change and save a document attached to someone's e-mail? So, now I have saved the list to a document in Word. Really don't feel like doing this a third time!! My apologies to those of you who have asked me all sorts of questions and I just haven't got back to you! Also, of course, to all those of you who think that maybe I have dropped off the edge of the planet. I really am still here, just finding it difficult to cope with all the things that have to be seen to as soon as possible - I'm not doing a very good job of getting any of them done, especially during this busiest time of the year.

I was hoping to choose a few of my photos from yesterday's day trip into British Columbia ready to post today, but I overslept till about 10:30 a.m. (less than an hour ago) and so still haven't gone through them : ) Took this photo of a Glacier Lily seedpod during a hike several of us went on to Arethusa Cirque, in Kananaskis, on July 30th. I thought it was a rather elegant seedpod.