The Colorado Rockies

 
Both in 2020 and 2021 the brother next to me and I backpacked in the Rocky Mountains west of Aspen, Colorado.  Last year we did part of the Four Passes Loop in the Maroon Bells.  This year we hiked to Cathedral Lake and Electric Pass and this year we each took a grandson along.  Neither trip was for the purpose of seeing native orchids but we did see a few, all of them familiar to me from the Pacific Northwest.

Platanthera dilatata var dilatata (Tall White Northern Bog Orchid)

Platanthera huronensis (Green Bog Orchis)

Platanthera x estesii (Estes Hybrid Rein Orchis)

Goodyera oblongifolia (Giant Rattlesnake Orchis)

Twenty-fifth Orchid of the Season and Others

Neottia banksiana, also known as Listera caurina, is one of our most common orchids.  known as the Northwestern Twayblade, we see it most often in open forests and along trailsides, and that was where we found these examples in Olympic National Park.  At first glance it looks like the much rarer Neottia convallarioides, but is easily distinguished from that species by the blackish markings on the top of the lip.  It grows to 30 cm tall, though these plants were all smaller and carries up to fifteen insect-like flowers.  The friend from Canada who I was with when I photographed these found several plants with a third leaf, a much rarer form of the species, fma. trifolia.

Neottia banksiana

Neottia banksiana fma. trifolia

The same day we found the Neottias we also found Platanthera dilatata var. leucostachys and Platanthera stricta, the Tall White Northern Bog Orchis and the Slender Bog Orchis.  These were growing on wet banks and in wet ditches along the roadside, exactly where one would expect to find them.  Though we found hundreds of the Neottias, these were very few in number, due I am sure to the hot dry summer we've had.  These were still in good conditions but there were far fewer of them than previous years and we found none of the hybrid between the two species, Platanthera xestesii, Estes Rein Orchis, but that may have been due to overly enthusiastic mowing of the roadsides by the Park Service.

Platanthera dilatata var. leucostachys

Realized as I prepared this post that I never photographed Platanthera stricta.

Thirteenth Orchid of the Season

One of our ferry stops on the way to Alaska was in Juneau where we were delayed for over eight hours.  We used the time to hike the Spaulding trail and the Auke Nu trail just south of the ferry terminal and found two native orchids along the trail, the Green Bog Orchis, Platanthera huronensis, featured in another post, and the Tall White Northern Bog Orchis, Platanthera dilatata var. dilatata.  The latter species grows all over the Pacific Northwest but is always a treat to see.  It is also strongly scented and is a delight for that reason also.  There are three varieties of this species distinguished by the length of the spur.  This variety has a spur that equals the length of the lip.  This was our first sighting of the species but we expect to see many more of them before the summer is over and hope to see the other varieties as well.

Platanthera dilatata var. dilatata

Platanthera dilatata is one of our most common native orchids, but none-the-less beautiful for that.  Its flowers are not only pure white but intensely fragrant, perfuming a whole area on a warm summer day.  Its common reflects the fact that it is always found in wet areas, often with its feet in shallow running water. For that reason, too, it is often found in roadside ditches.  There are three varieties distinguished by the length of the spur.  This variety, Platanthera dilatata var. dilata, has a spur that is more or less equal to the length of the lip.  The other varieties, less common than this, have longer or shorter spurs.

June 23
(Blewett Pass)

June 24
(Blewett Pass)

July 7
(Canadian Rockies)

 July 9
(Canadian Rockies)