Mount Evans Highway, Colorado Highway 5, opened to the public on June 4th for the 2021 season. A change this year is that reservations are required for vehicles. Mount Evans has many wildflowers and especially alpine varieties. In early June 2019, Bernie and I started our visit to Mount Evans at the Dos Chapel Nature Center, which has an alpine flower garden built around it. We saw Goldflower, Sky Pilot, Wallflowers and other flowers in bloom.
We then took the winding road to the very top of Mt. Evans and looked for patches of Forget-Me-Nots. We joined a caravan of other tourists to the top. Mountain goats along the way stopped the flow of cars with their antics. Even as we reached the top parking area, the goats were hopping around more or less oblivious to the visitors. We walked down the trail behind the bathrooms in the direction of the observatory and soon spotted alpine flowers along the steep rocky trail.
We saw Alpine-Forget-Me-Not, Alpine Phlox, Fairy Primrose, and Alpine Spring Beauty. These lovely alpine flowers are all detailed in our new third edition 272-page pocket guide, Rocky Mountain Wildflowers Field Guide. It is available at www.highcountryartworks.com and on Amazon. Ask for our book also at the Echo Lake Lodge Gift Store on the way up to Mt. Evans.
