Plants of Rocky Mountain National Park
The 13 plants you can find at Rocky Mountain National Park, like the American pasqueflower — sizes, diets, and whether you should worry.
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Plant American pasqueflower
Pulsatilla patens ssp. multifida
A furry, purple-blue prairie flower that beats the grass out of the ground each spring, blooming before almost anything else is green.
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Plant Big sagebrush
Artemisia tridentata
The silver-leaved, sharp-smelling evergreen shrub of the high desert West, and the main food of the greater sage-grouse nearly all year.
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Plant Colorado blue columbine
Aquilegia coerulea
Colorado's blue-and-white state flower, its long spurs full of nectar that only a hawkmoth's tongue can reach.
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Plant Douglas-fir
Pseudotsuga menziesii
One of the tallest trees on Earth, not actually a true fir, whose cones carry little three-pointed flaps a Native story calls the tails and legs of hiding mice.
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Plant Engelmann spruce
Picea engelmannii
A high-elevation spruce with scaly bark and sharp, squarish needles, whose Colorado stands have lost more than a million acres to a beetle since 1996.
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Plant Fireweed
Chamerion angustifolium
A tall pink-purple wildflower that is often the first color to return to a burned mountainside.
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Plant Glacier lily
Erythronium grandiflorum
A nodding yellow spring flower whose bulb is such important grizzly bear food that the bear's digging can grow bigger flowers the following year.
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Plant Indian paintbrush
Castilleja miniata
A scarlet mountain wildflower that steals water and food from its neighbors' roots, and whose bright color comes from leaves, not petals.
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Plant Lodgepole pine
Pinus contorta var. latifolia
The thin-barked pine covering 80% of Yellowstone's forest, some of whose cones only open in the heat of a fire.
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Plant Ponderosa pine
Pinus ponderosa
A tall western pine whose sun-warmed bark smells like butterscotch and vanilla, and which drops its low branches so ground fire can pass safely beneath it.
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Plant Quaking aspen
Populus tremuloides
A white-barked mountain tree whose flat-stemmed leaves shiver in the lightest breeze, turning whole hillsides gold each fall.
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Plant Subalpine fir
Abies lasiocarpa
A narrow, spire-shaped high-mountain fir with smooth gray bark and flat, soft needles, moving in wherever fire has stayed away long enough.
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Plant Western wheatgrass
Pascopyrum smithii
A blue-green prairie grass whose underground rhizomes weave a tough sod — the official state grass of North and South Dakota.