Watching Washington Butterflies With Bob Pyle: Number Six

an excerpt from Mariposa Road, with thanks to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

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 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 special 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 a 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.

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