Watching Washington Butterflies with Bob Pyle: Number Thirty Six

In the late 1960s, when the Ecology Action club was going strong at the UW, we members had to come up with a program every month. When we couldn’t find anything else, we fell back on the films made by David Brower, president of the Sierra Club, about one major conservation campaign or another. One of our favorites concerned the North Cascades, and as we were ourselves deeply involved in the struggle to create a North Cascades National Park, this beautiful film furnished not only entertainment and enlightenment, but also pep talk, no matter how many times we watched it. We also ogled the Sierra Club exhibit format book on the North Cascades, and Ira Spring and Harvey Manning’s 101 Hikes in the North Cascades. We simply assumed that we would, in the fullness of time, hike all those trails, see all those lakes, and in general become as intimate with the wildlands of Washington as were our idols. I likewise reckoned that we would one day sample the butterflies in all these high redoubts.

As the years passed, we got up there where and when we could, and walked some of the trails: Cascade Pass from Stehekin, the Suiattle River (with Justice Douglas, protesting Kennecott Copper’s plan to place an open-pit mine on Miner’s Ridge by Image Lake), and other spots accessible from Stevens or Snoqualmie passes. Some of us got out and up more than others. However, the time has come to admit (half a century later) that we’re never going to get up to most of the wilderness whose eventual visitation we took for granted all those years ago. So now we return to Slate Peak and Hurricane Ridge and the very few other alpine heights we can reach by automobile. And very few of the working lepidopterists seem to put their REI gear to work in the remote high country.

Now, there have been exceptions. There were Andy Anderson of Pateros and John Hopfinger of Brewster, who trudged up into the Sawtooths, Twisp Pass, and other remote enclaves from the twenties on, first finding the Astarte Fritillary in the Lower 48 and making many other important early records. There were the Svihlas, who clambered over High Divide and other Olympic passages in the thirties, coming up with some of the few butterfly records of the High Olympics that we possess, beyond Hurricane Ridge. In the seven- ties, young Shaundelle Vail and her parents backpacked into the Pasayten Wilderness and extended our knowledge of the distribution of the Labrador Sulphur, the Alpine Checkered Skipper, and others. Jon Pelham, Merrill Peterson, and Jimmy Pearson followed up a few years later, packing into Horseshoe Basin. Robert Kirk regularly took to the alpine wilderness with his net, establishing for the first time that Vidler’s Alpine occurs south of Snoqualmie Pass, at Mt. Margaret, in 1983—still the southernmost known record in the world for this Cascadian endemic species. Ed and Cathy Maxwell extended its known occurrence in the southeastern Olympic wilderness, and Bill Yake did the same for the Valerata Arctic. My party and I found the Makah Copper well beyond the trailhead in Olympic National Park’s northwestern corner. Thea and I recorded new beachheads for the Mountain Parnassian and Arctic Blue in the Dark Divide de facto wilderness of Skamania County while backpacking with a group from the Washington Native Plant Society.

But such forays on foot have been far fewer than motoring butterfly outings. Most of us stick to the near-vicinity of the roadways, and while we may cover some off-road territory on our day-hikes, the number of people who take nets when hiking deeper into the national forests is vanishingly small. Even among those who prefer cameras to nets (a necessity in national parks, unless you can score a permit), few images have been returned from terra incognita. As for the people charged with exploring our mountain parks for butterflies, the Cascades Butterfly Project, while their work has been excellent and valuable, it tends to focus on the same transects year after season. This has its profound purposes, such as measuring the response of high country butterflies to changing temperatures, but it doesn’t aspire toward expanding their known ranges into remote, unrecorded localities.

So what are we missing? Only the last major areas in Washington with no butterfly records at all, or next to none. The Enchantments, the William O. Douglas and Norse Mountain wildernesses, Trapper Creek, the upper Wenaha-Tucannon, even the Goat Rocks and the farther parts of Mt. Adams and Glacier Peak, have very few dots on the map. And as for the Pickett Range and certain other sections of the North Cascades National Park, as well as whole high watersheds such as the Napeequa, the northern Pasayten, and vast areas of the interior Olympics, we have no butterfly knowledge at all. And there are a good many others. Any sampling or reliable photos at all would constitute whole new quanta of biogeographical and faunistic information about our natural heritage. The maps and data books are thirsty for such knowledge.

What about species? Just what butterflies are you likely to find in the uncharted wilderness? Well, that’s just the point: we can’t quite say. If we could, there wouldn’t be much point in going to all the effort, and it will be a lot of effort to get into these places. Nor is there any guarantee: you might backpack for a week in, a week out, only to find an entirely ordinary fauna (though there are no useless records: even such a result would help fill out the picture). And (of course you know this): the weather, hatch, and (these days) fire season might not cooperate, skunking your best-laid one-foot-after-the-other, mile after mile trek, all uphill.

But! The opposite outcome might also come true. You might get up there, take off your half-ton pack, pitch camp, and wake the next morning to crystal skies and butterflies abounding. This happened on my fiftieth birthday, when Thea and I made a short backpack up to Silver Star Mountain in Clark County, where most people merely take day-hikes, for lack of water (which we carried in). The lug paid off in vast sunny meadows fairly painted with wildflowers, and the best array of butterflies we’d ever seen on the West Side, apart from the meadows of the high Olympics.

And if you should find yourself in fresh territory for butterfly exploration in optimal conditions, you just could come up with a state or county record, or at least (by definition) range extensions. Since most such virgin grounds are at high elevation and in the North, you should be on the lookout for Canadian species that might or might not ever have been recorded on the U.S. side of the border. A few of the species that just could show up in northernmost Washington include the Aphrodite Fritillary, the White Admiral, and Macoun’s Arctic at middle-montane elevations; and the Draco Skipper and the Rockslide Checkerspot in the Arctic Alpine. More likely would be new locations for those very sparsely found grails of the Washington list, the Alpine Checkered Skipper, the Lustrous Copper, the Astarte Fritillary, and the Melissa Arctic. It would be a very fine thing to extend our knowledge of these species in the state, especially now that their future may be imperiled by rising temperatures, drying, and bigger fires.

I hope my arguments will induce the trailworthy amongst us to put our boots on and get out there! I include myself. I’m no longer up to many of those far-flung hikes that I took for granted I would someday do, all those years ago. But I can still wander past the “Wilderness Area” sign as far as I feel like, and there are wonders to behold even quite close to the road. Even if you don’t make your intended goal, you may find great things along the way as far as you get. Once, on another birthday, I intended to backpack into the Enchanted Valley in the middle of Olympic National Park. Between ill-fitting boots and excruciating flies, my hiking partner and I decided to bail on the long-distance objective, and as far as I know, the Enchanted Valley has still never been sampled for butterflies. But on the way out, well above Lake Quinault, I found the first record for the Western Sulphur in the southwestern Olympics. Don’t forget that horses and llamas may be enlisted on many trails, too, spreading the burden and increasing the reach.

I especially hope that younger, fitter hikers with a soft spot for butterflies may read this and be induced to wander high, wide, and handsome, far beyond the known country, deep into our precious federal wilderness, with nets, notebooks, and cameras in hand. Lepidopterists are famous for being creatures of habit, returning to known localities and favorite habitats again and again, and for collecting close to their cars. Let’s encourage a new generation of butterfly explorers, undaunted by healthy exertion and enchanted by the prospect of new knowledge and fresh discovery. Let’s birth a batch of backpacking butterfliers—then sit back and watch to see what they bring back!

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