Spring Phenology
By Josh Boling
Broadcast 4.2 & 4.5.2025
Glacier lilies bursting forth in spring. Photo by Allison De Jong.
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Spring is not my favorite season—that is, unless you’re talking about phenological spring in the mountains. That one’s my favorite. The equinox is fine, but it’s fleeting, more of an astronomical formality than a seasonal rite. And meteorological spring is practical for the calendar, if completely uninteresting. But phenological spring—that’s real life.
“Spring phenology” is the term we’ve coined for our understanding of the cyclical cooperation of climate and biology that prompts the end of hibernations and the beginning of migrations, the germinating of sprouts and the greening of leaves. And in the mountains, phenological spring is an episodic march uphill, a slow creep from the valley floor through the elevations—interrupted from time to time by a zealous and persistent winter—until it finally arrives at the alpine in time to welcome astronomical summer. Each day, each week, spring arrives somewhere new, and topography becomes its own calendar. My favorite promenade is that of the flowers.
Glacier lilies are one of the first harbingers of phenological spring, and they’ll chase the retreating snowpack toward alpine peaks halfway to the next equinox. I remember the first glacier lily I recognized. High in the Uinta mountains on some sunny June day years ago, a botanist buddy pointed it out—its unassuming and curly yellow petals accenting a pair of waxy-green, spear-shaped leaves barely an inch off the trail. I bent down to investigate and was quickly left behind.
I nearly did the same to my oldest daughter all these years later when, finally freed from the cabin fever of a long, cold winter, we headed to a trail I knew would be free enough from snow. We were both preoccupied by our own adventures when she discovered it, stopped, stooped, and inspected. I noticed her absence a dozen yards down trail and turned to find her lying in the wet duff, her face barely an inch away from those unassuming petals. My reminder to slow down. Later in the season, we ventured to a meadow I know high in the mountains when it, too, was finally free enough from snow. The glacier lilies were already there, chasing the snow uphill, and my daughter gave chase to them, stopping at each trailside bouquet as we hiked.
Phenological spring in the mountains is a crescendo of color, and my family returns to the meadow throughout spring’s journey through the elevations to witness the evolution of the glacier lily’s bright and cheery opening solo into a brilliant symphony of spring beauties, shooting stars, and Indian paintbrushes; beargrasses, columbines, and monkeyflowers; penstemons, mountain heathers, and wandering daisies. At the height of the sonata, the glacier lilies wane, giving way to other blooms that have been biding their time. But occasionally, you can crawl beneath a krummholzed fir to find the ghosts of springs past—flowers that would have otherwise been gone for several weeks—blooming in a hidden microclimate, the phenological clock reset.
I remember finding one together once, a lone spring beauty beneath a stunted Engelmann spruce. My daughter reached, I knew, to pick it, so I gently stopped her arm.
“We can’t pick it, honey.”
“But why?” she implored.
“Others need to see it.”
“Okay,” she said, disappointed but understanding.
Later, as we ambled through another part of the meadow, she pointed out flower patch after flower patch.
“We can’t pick these,” she reminded me. “The other people need to see them.”
“They sure do, honey. They sure do.”
Spring in the mountains is my favorite season because it slows life down and allows memories to be relived in real time. There is always something in bloom, in memory of bloom, or hope of bloom.
Every week since 1991, Field Notes has inquired about Montana’s natural history. Field Notes are written by naturalists, students, and listeners about the puzzle-tree bark, eagle talons, woolly aphids, and giant puffballs of Western, Central and Southwestern Montana and aired weekly on Montana Public Radio.
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