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| Last Gray's lily of the season (6/26/2024) |
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| Same plant (2023) |
Elk Knob is a mile-high mountain in Watauga County, North Carolina, just 15 miles from my doorstep in Boone. It's been a state park since 2003, and for several years in my 50s I volunteered to help build the hiking trail to the summit. I try to hike at least once a month, often after work on summer evenings.
The masthead of this blog shows the sun rising over Elk Knob, with a photo taken from adjacent Snake Mountain.
In 2024, my 70th year, my goal was to "hike my age"—70 trips to the summit. I was on pace to make it until Hurricane Helene struck and closed the state park for six weeks. In December, I hit 65, but the mountain and I were under the weather for the rest of my 70th year.
This goal put me on the trail several times a week, so to keep the trips from getting tedious, I given them a purpose—this wildflower journal. I'm no authority on wildflowers, just learning on the way.
The big show on Elk Knob is in June. In 2024, flame azalea bloomed June 6-20 and Gray's lilies June 8-26. These quickly dried up, and by the end of the month, pollinators were grazing on the drooping leftovers.
Turk's Cap lilies were in bloom through July, along with coneflowers and turtleheads and the relentless purple Angelica.
Elk Knob is one of the few places in the world where you can see Gray's lily. They are named for Harvard botanist Asa Gray, who happened to be on Roan Mountain when they bloomed in 1840.
My experience is that if you're a day early or a day late, you may miss them. These perennials are also ephemerals.
For the past three years, I've taken an informal census of the Gray's lilies on Elk Knob. This year, I found 17 plants and 18 blossoms (plus more than a dozen lilies that never blossomed). Last year, 10 plants and 17 blossoms. In 2022, I did not count plants but found 12 blossoms. These are just plants I find along the trail, plus a couple of off-trail locations that I know. Certainly, there are many more elsewhere on the mountain, but this trailside sample gives me an indication that the population on Elk Knob is stable.
As perennials, Gray's lilies can be found in the same place year after year. Also, wildlife scatter the seed to new locations. We evidently lost one lily, which had six blossoms last year but did not reappear in 2024. It was in the midst of the blighted beech forest, so it might have been crushed by a falling tree or nibbled by a deer.
Almost all these lilies were above 5,000 feet in elevation. There is one outlier at 4,600 feet, but it is too close to the trail and lost its bud to a broken stem for the second year in a row.
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| June 2024 was unusually cool and dry, though we were in the clouds on 6/17. |
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| Seed capsule from the above flower (7/23/2024, later mowed down by trail workers) |
