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Up the Arlington–Darrington Road, big salmon letters on a gray metal barn read “HAY.” It was that season already. Another said “Fresh Blueberries”—that season too. Tired big-leaf maples hung over the road on the left, fir and cedar on the right, as I ascended the Stillaguamish River. “Thieves go to hell” was hand-painted on a garage door; a bluegrass festival was coming to Darrington with seventeen bands.
The towns get progressively prettier as the North Cascades Highway ascends, as do their names: Concrete, Rockport, Marblemount (“Gateway to the American Alps”). Winding up the wonderful Skagit River, I’d have loved to stop and see my friends at the North Cascades Institute’s Environmental Learning Center, but there was no time for that. Mountain chickadees called at yet another Pacific Crest Trail crossing. I skipped it this time, eager to reach the hot east side to hunt summer species of the northern range. I crossed over at 6:00 P.M. at 4,855-foot Rainy Pass. As for “American Alps,” between there and Washington Pass, I’d hold them up to any in Austria or Switzerland. I remembered why Thea and I had testified on behalf of our student conservation club before Senator Scoop Jackson in favor of the North Cascades National Park some forty years ago. And though I was driving the highway now, I was glad that most of the park was unroaded wilderness.
About half of the light traffic on Highway 20 this evening was motorcycles—loud Harleys, fast racers, and a few quiet Gold Wings. A pack of four speeding sports bikes, tightly bunched, was coming toward me. Just before we passed, a snowshoe hare bounded out across the road between us. The lead cycle didn’t miss it by more than six inches at sixty-plus miles an hour. Had he hit it, he might well have flipped, the ones behind running into him and any one of them sliding across the centerline into me. Or it could have been just the hare. That was a close call, at least for the snowshoe, and likely for the rest of us. As I passed 375,000 miles on Powdermilk’s odometer, I couldn’t help but speculate on luck, chance, and circumstance. And a good drivers’ education teacher in high school, who took my buddies and me out cruising on the high plains east of Aurora for the best hour of the week, as he drummed defensive driving into our rash young skulls.
Klipchuck campground in full sun, granola and coffee, western tanagers and western wood-pewees, the soft voices of tenters at breakfast. Chickarees dashing through the shade. I hoped to find thicket hairstreaks here, as I had before with classes. One of two Cascadian hairstreaks whose larvae consume mistletoe, in this case on pines, Mitoura spinetorum fluctuates in numbers. But nectar was sparse, the season advanced, and one way and another, the bug blew me off. So I walked down to the Klipchuck River bridge, where a morning’s worth of frits, ‘streaks, and nymphs flitted about. A woodland skipper alighted on my brown arm and tried to suck sweat but couldn’t get his proboscis through my pelage. I put out bananas for bait. A satyr anglewing basked on thimbleberry and currant below the bridge, and a faun anglewing soon lit between the bananas and a pat of bearberry scat next to them, unable to make up its mind, like a kid in an ice-cream shop.
Then a really big nymph did a flyby. Could it be a Compton tortoiseshell? It landed in the road, enormous, then alit on a bare branch at eye level, wings shut, its two-tone hindwings and unique silver J showing clearly. This was only my second Nymphalis vaualbum ever in Washington, in much better condition than the overwintered rags I’d seen in Alaska. Later, I spotted the Compton fully spread on a moist, sunny bank. I saw its four white spots, one on each wing, and the broad golden border around the trailing edge of the jagged hindwings—a simply stunning butterfly, one of the best sightings of the year. As if for comparison, a California tortoise-shell flew down and spread its wings, with just the two white spots. It put up its larger congener—headline: “Spunky Cal Tort Routs Compton”—but then the heftier Compton returned and reclaimed the prime basking space.
Nothing bloomed at Early Winters campground, where I turned to follow the Methow River up toward the crest. I stopped at Mazama Store for a slab of sharp cheddar and a copy of The Methow Naturalist. Then up past the steep rock Goat Wall, like a mini-El Capitan. The farther up the steep dirt Methow, the narrower the road between cliff and precipice, and the moister and more flowery the roadsides. Between Harts Pass and Slate Peak, blues, checkers, frits, and parnos grew so thick as to practically halt my progress.
I arrived at the top of Slate Peak Road before three, in patchy clouds. Thrust up between North Cascades National Park and the Pasayten Wilderness area, Slate Peak is to the North Cascades as Hurricane Ridge is to the Olympics: the easiest place to get into the high country. But Slate, in national forest unlike Hurricane, is conducive to nets. This circumstance brought many entomologists over the years and led to some notable discoveries. The mountain became known as the most reliable and accessible place to find several butterflies rare in Washington. On this visit, I wasn’t going to hike to the top to look for lustrous coppers, as I’d seen them in both California and Colorado. My objective was the fabled Astarte fritillary, biggest of the Bolorias, represented in the Lower 48 only in the Montana Rockies and the North Cascades. One of the biennial species, Astarte flies here only in even years. In 2006, on my fifty-ninth birthday, Thea and I had seen a few fly by us here; but I’d never observed Astarte well and up close.
As I began down the West Fork Pasayten River trailhead, the clouds closed in, the day cooled, and I feared for my prospects. Then I descried a person, prone, a couple of switchbacks down. I thought he might have fallen. But when I made out that he was alive, examining plants, and had a net, I knew in a flash that he must be St. Dave—Nunnallee, that is; unless he was Dana Visali, editor of The Methow Naturalist. He didn’t notice me till I’d tiptoed down the steep, rocky switchbacks and was upon him. With startling originality, I said, “Dr. Nunnallee, I presume.”
Talk about a happy “hail fellow, well met!” Up here on the remote rockslide yet. A retired state ecologist, Dave became enamored of the immature stages of our butterflies and had been rearing them with zeal and photographing every stage. A state entomologist named David James, who works on biocontrol in vineyards, shared a passion for this work. The two Daves were close to completing a photographic record of every Washington species’ development, from egg to adult, for what will be a stunning book. Already today Dave had found three arctic blue eggs on spotted saxifrage. That’s the same plant Astarte uses, so we both trained our attention on the rockslide, in hopes of seeing one.
When the sun came back, we began to see Astarte coursing down the rocks, big, bright, and like nothing else. I would have been content with that, but Dave said, “Look!” and there was one alighted thirty feet away on a yellow daisy. I got great bino looks, first of the dorsum, with its unusual, salmony orange; and then the ventrum, both in direct light and as backlit stained glass, with its utterly distinctive mosaic of cream and rust. Astarte arose, then flew nearer, alighting in a classic position on the yellow flower smack between two rocks, eight inches apart. It was very beautiful, and a very difficult net shot. But with Dave’s consent, Marsha made the attempt and got it! So Dave and I were able to examine Astarte in hand, a perfect big female. Dave took some excellent pictures, both before and after we set her loose. In one of these, she perches with a rock for a backdrop that looks in the image just like a major mountain rising behind her.
So then I needed to see Erebia vidleri, having bombed out on it in the Olympics. This was a scary situation: since the day and the flight season were both almost over, there would be little more opportunity, and I could not imagine our special Washington alpine absent from the list of the year’s encounters. Dave thought the best chance for it was down in the meadows toward Harts Pass, in the salad bowl of a valley above the horse lot. I remembered that green glacial cirque as a piece of paradise. The two of us dropped down the loopy road to tramp those meadows for a late-day hour.
The wildflowers were superb. Little flew so late, but we were having a fine time talking butterflies and perambulating one of the most scenic alpine settings in the world, or anywhere else. Then I kicked up a Vidler’s and cried, “There’s one!” Dave spotted another, and there might have been a third. Mine settled, and I binoed it beside an Elephantella: round brown wings, yellow-orange eye-spotted patches, frosty band and white dash, huddled right up to a pink baby mammoth. It brought back an August day in 1970, up on Mt. Baker, when I finally got my photograph of Vidler’s alpine for Watching Washington Butterflies—also at the very last chance. So, once again, the neutron-butterfly-bombed Olympics notwithstanding, I didn’t miss out on what Pyle (in The Butterflies of Cascadia) called “the most striking of American alpines.”
As we walked down at almost 6:00 P.M., the sun again emerged, and butterflies erupted from the floral array—tiny Mormon fritillaries, both silvered and unsilvered, plus Anna’s blues, a single arctic fritillary, and finally a bright little mariposa copper on wet sand by the brook at meadow’s bottom. Dave said, “Where are you staying tonight? I’ve got a room with two beds at the Methow Country Inn.” That’s where I was staying, as it turned out. Dave also treated me kindly to a fine dinner and breakfast, in support of the project. I sang for my supper with the story of (and a peek at) the Ballard Dumpster butterfly fauna.
Next day on the Loup Loup road, I crossed from the Methow to the Okanogan River. These Cascadean valleys have farms at the bottom, timber at the top. On the way up I passed alfalfa fields dancing with whites, sulphurs, and Melissa blues. Soon I entered pines and found JR campground bursting with butterflies. Sulphurs proliferated, but rather than the orange and clouded sulphurs of the alfalfa fields, these were montane specialists on native legumes (Queen Alexandra’s sulphurs) and blueberries (pink-edged sulphurs). You haven’t seen a thing until you’ve looked Colias interior in its chartreuse eyes and regarded the deep rose borders of its buttercup wings. C. alexandra females, absent of black borders such as the males possess, come in both white and yellow forms. A yellow one flirted with Powdermilk; a white one wraithed sheetlike through the pines. But when I first swung at one, I got the torque wrong, and Marsha snapped in half at the site of an earlier injury. Darn! Akito came out.
On a little track off the end of Forest Road number 100, butterflies teemed in a large, moist meadow. The most common of twenty-five species present was the northern blue. Like Nabokov’s blue in Colorado, this Okanogan race has converged with Melissa’s blue of the lowlands so that their chief distinction is ecological. Both Lycaeides idas and L. melissa display orange lunules that Nabokov named aurorae, backed by blue sparkles he called scintillae. The two blues divide their worlds between high-country specialization and low-country generalism. Private and public ownership patterns allow each to thrive in its preferred home of farm or forest. Now I returned to the alfalfa fields to find a Melissa to compare with its nearby northern look-alikes. By walking along the fenced fields and flicking the sweet purple plants with Akito, I put up one roosting male—the day’s last butterfly, of thousands.
Down in the Methow Valley, it was still very hot at 7:30. Outside Twisp, I was compelled to stop for an amazing spectacle: a mass hunting party of nighthawks, perhaps fifty of them. They flew back and forth in circles and swerved over the fields on either side of the highway and across the road itself, hawking some hatch or other. I stood among them, and they carried on all around me, nearly flicking my face several times. There were many midair near-collisions, but they always just missed or tapped and shot on, showing their big white wing patches. When they spread their tails to brake, white spots showed up in that dark fork too. I could see their grays and browns and handsome striations in flight, everything but the vibrissae around their great gapes. People are so unobservant and drive so damn fast. I tried to slow them down. Some did, and nodded, others sped up. But the caprimulgids did a good job of avoiding the speeding trucks and SUVs, seeming to play with them before dodging. I saw no roadkills, though many close calls. Those sicklewings changed direction on an air dime.
The spectacle thinned out. A killdeer called, cows grazed, sprinklers sprinkled. Shadows grew huge and long in the lowering sun.