Racing the Seasons for Alpine Seeds

Notes From the Field

As part of the objectives of the Alpine Strategy, Betty Ford Alpine Gardens’ Conservation Team spends the summer scouting, documenting, and collecting from high-elevation plant populations across our local mountain ranges for long-term seed banking. Below is a firsthand account from Brooke Weller, this season’s Conservation Intern, from a recent trip.

Being someone who spends most of their weekdays working in the alpine and most of their weekends recreating there has its perks: I get to act as an unofficial scout for alpine plants on my days off. During a weekend day trip in mid-July to summit Gold Dust Peak in the Holy Cross Wilderness, I noticed something amazing while scrambling up the last 700 feet along a scree ridge: hundreds, maybe thousands, of alpine spring beauty (Claytonia megarhiza) in full bloom.

Feeling like I’d hit the jackpot, I knew I had to return–and I did, earlier this week, packing my bag with vouchering and seed-collecting gear for my highest-elevation trip of the season, topping out around 13,000 feet. When I got back to Gold Dust Peak with Gardens’ volunteer Gigi, those vibrant pink blooms had given way to seed-filled capsules, ready for collecting.

Conserving these high-elevation populations feels less like fieldwork and more like a privilege. There’s nothing more rewarding than knowing the plants that hold the mountain summits together, right here in our own backyard, are secured in our seed bank against extinction.

This trip added a collection of Claytonia megarhiza to our ex situ conservation efforts, and is one of the several alpine taxa documented and collected this season across the Holy Cross Wilderness by our team. Each collection like this one helps build a safety net for species that are becoming increasingly vulnerable as alpine habitats shift with a changing climate.