Wildflowers of Lake Catherine trail, Little Cottonwood Canyon

Whenever we go hiking we like to identify wildflowers, using our trusty wildflower book. I also love this website, with its extensive image index of Utah wildflowers (and the photos are gorgeous). I hope someday to have a useful photo index of flowers I've seen and photographed myself!

Anyway, it's my favorite thing when there are fields with all different colors of wildflowers growing at the same time. So lovely!! I think the Albion Basin is one of the best places to see flowers in the state. (More pictures here.)

 Lake Catherine

Below, I'll try to identify the flowers we saw. I know there were a few I didn't get good pictures of, and there are also a few I'm not totally sure I identified correctly. But I think most of them are right.

 Silvery Lupine

Paintbrush, in several colors. My book says that "paintbrush are slightly parasitic on the root systems of other plants, and it is possible that it is the host plant that determines the color of the paintbrush." So interesting!

 

Paintbrush (pink), with Common Yarrow (white)

Engelmann Aster

Bluebells

Clover-headed Mint

Rocky Mountain Columbine

Fireweed

Gordon's Ivesia

King Flax

 

I think this is Tomie's Owlsclover, but I can't quite see the foliage well enough to know for sure.

Mountain Dandelion. This was the only flower of its kind we saw on the entire hike. I wonder why?

 One of my favorites---Wasatch Penstemmon (the purple flower). The white is Nuttall's Linanthus.

Nuttall's Linanthus, closer up

Sticky Geranium

 Richardson's Geranium

False Forget-me-not (I don't know what's so false about it. "And this isn't my forget-me-not; it's a false one!")

 Wyeth's Buckwheat---although in my book, it doesn't have any pink on it! I love the two-tone effect here.

Desert Groundsel. You can't tell the scale, but this is a very tiny flower---very cute!

Little Sunflowers (yellow) surrounded by Nettleleaf Horsemint. It does look like nettle---I kept thinking it was stinging nettle when I saw the leaves. I wish I had thought to sniff it to see if we noticed the aroma of mint.

I think these are sunflowers too, even though their middles are lighter. Or they could be Arrowleaf Balsamroot?

One more flower I know we saw, but didn't get a picture of, was this funny Western Coneflower.

I hope we have a chance to get up into the mountains a couple more times while the flowers are at their peak, but I'm so grateful we at least got to see these!