After a beautiful seven weeks, the time has come to leave the mountains and depart for more civilized and less magical parts of the world. So a short valedictory to my summer home, the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. Here is the lab’s home: the townsite of Gothic, once home to a small mining town. We…

My corner of Colorado is home to high peaks and deep glacial lakes – this montane and alpine zone hosts characteristic species like pines, firs, and a host of perennial herbs and shrubs like Erigeron spp.,  Potentilla sp. and Veratrum tenuipetalum. Here you can see several of these species near a wilderness lake at the…

Mountains can be precarious piles of rocks. In the Rockies, annual freeze-thaw cycles fracture solid rock into loose scree fields and talus slopes. The results are steep mountainsides like the one you see here on the back side of Treasury in western Colorado. Rocks on these slopes sit nearly at the angle of repose –…

When hiking in the alpine zone, it is a pleasure to hear a sharp chirp – the call of an American pika (Ochotona princeps). These lovely animals inhabit the talus slopes and rock outcrops at the very highest elevations. Surprisingly they do not hibernate but rather stay active through the winter by relying on stored…