Video
Ranger Brief: Paradise Meadows in Fall
Transcript
Yummm, I’m eating blueberries and a couple of little huckleberries. During the fall here at Mount Rainier they are ripening and you can eat all you want, but there’s only one condition. You have to keep both your feet on the trail. Now the bears up here, they don’t have that restriction. They can eat berries anywhere they want.
So right here, these two are blue berries, these three are huckleberries. And the blueberries are slightly larger; huckleberries more purple than blue; and they- you will find them in any open area here in Paradise or anywhere on the mountain. They like the sunshine and the warmth but when it gets to be nice cold nights they ripen very quickly.
So they’re sweet, they’re tasty, but one thing I have to say is you have to pick an awful lot of them to make a pie.
Well fall brings a lot of changes to the meadows and while we see the flowers disappearing still or going to seed, as the mountain aster is doing right now, one of the others is the false hellebore, or corn lily. Now that has beautiful, big, green, leaves in the early summer, but now it is looking yellow. But an intriguing fact about it is, is it’s a very poisonous plant during its growing season but when it’s finished growing all the poison goes back down to the roots and the deer will come and eat it as will a little tiny mite, that makes the holes in the leaves. But the deer will never touch it while it’s green, only after the poison leaves.
Well while the other flowers seem to be dying out, the pearly everlasting will last until after the first frost. Their little white buds- whiled names everlasting, because they seem to last longer and longer- they start as little white balls and then make this very tiny flower, very slowly, so that they’re here for a very long time in comparison to the others. They arrive probably the second stage of flowers, but they outlast everybody.
Well we’ve seen the yellow that the false hellebore turns, but now when you look up on the hillside you can see patches of brown, and as I move over in that direction I see it is turning even more reddish-brown, and eventually the whole hillside will be yellows, and oranges, and reds, and brown even, and a whole different color than you see when the flowers are here.
Some parts we’re seeing- of the meadows of Mount Rainier- we’re seeing that fall is coming, we still have our beautiful mountain asters right here. These asters, lovely purple, but every meadow is different. Even right here you can see some of the seedheads have gone to their very fluffy let’s-blow-away-in-the-wind-and-make-more-mountain-asters.
Just across the trail from those beautiful flowers that were still blooming, the Cascade asters, we have a whole hillside that the flowers have not only bloomed, they’ve passed their bloom and the majority have gone to seedheads. Totally different, twenty feet apart.
The reason we have these differences in microclimatology. Every area is just slightly different. In one place the snow may have melted two weeks earlier than it did down below here. The sun hits this one for a different amount of time each day, the amount of water that was held in the soil while it was starting to grow; lots of these small things make a big difference as to what each meadow looks like. So no two meadows are going to be alike, and you will see different things when you keep your eyes open.
Here we have a huge amount of Sitka mountain ash, and one of the interesting things I see in it is the fact we talked about how different areas will grow at different rates, and the seasons and colors will change a little faster in one than another, and right here you can see some of the mountain ash is already starting to turn the leaves to a yellow and it will go to an orange color eventually. And here it’s still very dark green. But the fruit is what is startling. It’s bright red; it’s well-loved by the animals around here, the rabbits, the birds, the squirrels, the chipmunks; and it will stay on the bush until the snow totally buries it. Now the intriguing thing about this particular berry, is it does ferment on the bush and therefore one must be wary of, um, low-flying birds and squirrels that are a little tipsy.
Description
Paradise is famous for its lush wildflowers meadows. However, there is still plenty to see and discover in the meadows even when the flowers begin to fade in the fall. Join Ranger Maureen McLean as she shares some of the secrets of autumn meadows, from tasty treats to tipsy wildlife.
Description: A uniformed NPS Ranger stands outside in different places along a paved path and describes various meadow plants growing along the path.
Duration
5 minutes, 24 seconds
Credit
NPS
Date Created
09/12/2014
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