Засуха заставляет альпийскую овсяницу преждевременно терять мягкость и менять окраску

OUT AND ABOUT: Drought turns fleeceflower from soft to scratchy before its time Published 7:48 am Tuesday, August 25, 2026 Alpine fleeceflower is among my favorite mountain plants and an aptly named one, its leaves as soft against your skin as its consonants when they slip through your lips. But not this summer. The dreadful drought has transformed fleeceflower from soothing to scratchy, much as age or infirmity can turn a previously pleasant person into a grouch who complains about everything from the temperature of his morning coffee to the quality of daytime TV. Fleeceflower, like many plants in our arid climate, tends to lose its succulence around autumn’s arrival. But this year I first noticed during a July hike that the distinctive, hip-high stalks of fleeceflower beside the Elkhorn Crest Trail near Anthony Lakes, rather than caress my calves, were inflicting those white and painless marks that fade after a few minutes. In early August, while hiking in the Elkhorns and in the Wallowas, I crossed fields of fleeceflower with leaves well into the transition from summer’s green to the rusty red of October. The plants were so desiccated that they rattled in the wind, an eerie sort of moaning that reminded me of the husks in a lonely corn field muttering to themselves while they wait for winter to bury the somehow pathetic stubble. It happened that on the most recent of my walks, on Aug. 14, I hiked up Fruit Creek, north of Sumpter, past the Argonaut Mine and to the top of the divide between the Powder River and North Fork John Day drainages. This is prime fleeceflower country. But based on the maps I’ve seen of the McCulley Fire, which started eight days later after a lightning storm, I suspect some of the fleeceflower I waded through, wishing I had worn long pants to avoid the unpleasant sandpapery sensation, have been charred. The plants would have ignited easily, so dry they were. Fire, though, poses no great threat to the future of fleeceflower. The species thrives in the wake of all sorts of natural upheavals, whether of fire or ice. The late Charlie Johnson, the longtime and esteemed plant ecologist for the U.S. Forest Service in the Blue Mountains, wrote that fleeceflower “quickly colonizes after highly erosive events (landslides, avalanches).” That description is from Johnson’s 2004 book, “Alpine and Subalpine Vegetation of the Wallowa, Seven Devils and Blue Mountains.” I doubt there are half a dozen books on my shelves that I’ve consulted as often as Charlie’s opus, and none has contributed nearly as much to my understanding and enjoyment of our great mountains. You needn’t know anything of biology, of course, to appreciate the beauty of a field of wildflowers. But it pleases me to know that fleeceflower is a perennial herb and that its stems are glabrous — which is to say, smooth — and my appreciation for Charlie’s book is renewed with each reading. Charlie died in March 2007. Books are essentially eternal, though — it is one of their magical qualities — and Charlie’s affinity for the Blues, and for their trees and shrubs and grasses, continues to enrich all of us who lacked his encyclopedic knowledge. In the two pages he devotes to fleeceflower, Charlie wrote that the plant, like so many species, begins its seasonal color change after the first frost. But this year, it seems, the drought barged in and instigated this transition long before the equinox. When I was hiking above the Argonaut on Aug. 14, and six days earlier during a backpacking trip to Traverse Lake in the Wallowas, the fields of fleeceflower beginning to burnish red seemed to me a peculiar sight. It was as though the tamaracks had gone orange in September rather than around Halloween, or huckleberries had turned scarlet in June — a familiar scene but at the wrong time. I suppose I felt a trifle disconcerted because fleeceflower is for me one of our alpine icons, as essential to the high country as the gnarled, wind-battered branches of whitebark pines, the squawk of Clark’s nutcrackers, the feel of granite in the shade, as cool as a basement on the hottest afternoon. But no matter. The snow will come in its season to soften the landscape as only snow can, its weight gently bending the fleeceflower’s glabrous stalks and eventually covering it, as a mother lays a blanket over her sleeping infant. Jayson Jacoby is the editor of the Baker City Herald. Contact him at 541-518-2088 or jayson.jacoby @bakercityherald.com.