Wild Flowers in the San Juan Mountains
Category : Hikes
When we moved to Durango in 2001 we didn’t know anything about wild flowers. We had done quite a bit of hiking in Maryland and Virginia before the move but the most wild flowers we had seen were planted by the DOT in the median strips along the highways. We did notice them and I guess you could say that we appreciated them, at 65 MPH, with the radio cranking, on our way to the beach or my parents house in Salisbury, MD.
Skip ahead 13 years… our lives have changed considerably and our appreciation of the flowers has changed too. Now, we plan hikes based on the wild flower season and try to get out more often just to see if we can hit the peak. We know the common names of many varieties and keep running tallies in our heads of the varieties we have seen each year and the ones we are missing.
While we have taken pictures of flowers in the past, we never really spent the time to capture the beauty that you can only see close up on a hike through the vast wild flower meadows you find in the San Juan Mountains around Durango and Silverton, Colorado. This year I decided to change that. As you can see from the images below I picked a good year. Mother Nature didn’t disappoint with one of the best seasons we can remember.
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- There are too many yellow flowers to count so we just call them Damn Yellow Flowers or DYFs.
