From the valley floor through to the high alpine, you don’t need to be an outdoor enthusiast to enjoy the wildflowers that bring a healthy dash of colour to Whistler in the warmer months.
Besides looking down at the trail and up to the meadows, flowers dominate social media for a hot minute every year. Whistler Blackcomb, for its part, leans into the attraction, and wildflowers count as a key draw for the region overall.
Marc Bourdon, who has researched and authored guidebooks for hikers in the area, suggested that besides everywhere, hikers could find the best wildflowers in a handful of areas, such as the trail between Taylor Meadows to Helm Lake in Garibaldi Provincial Park; the meadows around Helm Lake; Brandywine Meadows; the meadows along Conflict Lake in the Callaghan Conservancy; the south-side traverse of the High Note trail on Whistler; Singing Pass and the area around Russet Lake between Blackcomb and Whistler; and the meadows above Semaphore Lakes off the Duffy northwest of Pemberton.
“You can find wildflowers all across the valley at all elevations depending on the time of year,” he said.
Whistler itself offers a unique opportunity in that people can take ski lifts into the subalpine and alpine terrain.
“Normally, to view the best wildflowers, you have to be willing to hike into the alpine, which can be fairly strenuous and long depending on the area and trail,” Bourdon said.
While it’s September and the wildflowers are winding down—Bourdon said the annual bloom runs from low to high elevation, from south to north—so you’ve got a good chance to see something for quite a few months, depending on your willingness to go out of your way.
“In Whistler, flowers typically start to appear in the valley in April or May, but this very much depends on the year—how much snow is down low and what are the spring temperatures?" he said. "The peak alpine wildflower bloom in Garibaldi Park (and around Whistler in general) typically occurs in mid to late July, but again this varies from year to year, often by a couple of weeks or more. Sunny, moist meadows in the subalpine tend to show the greatest diversity of flowers.”
While there’s lots of colours to enjoy during wildflower season, Whistler as a whole is host to some invasive species that are worth knowing about and keeping an eye out for. Flowers such as the orange hawkweed, common foxglove and bachelor’s button (orange, pink and blue) might offer bright colours to the local spectrum, but they are damaging additions to the natural landscape hiding in plain sight.
Claude-Anne Godbout-Gauthier of the Sea to Sky Invasive Species Council (SSISC) said the quality of the environment and the likelihood of invasive flowers hiding amongst the wildflowers comes down to how well-travelled an area is.
“We tend to see more invasive species along what we call built environments—lots that are under construction, built trails and parks,” she said.
“Largely because they’re being moved by shoes, moved around by construction, or the changes in the built environment. It's also because invasives are more adaptable than other typical native plants, so they’re able to thrive in less-than-ideal conditions like gravel or dry conditions.”
Community science
Up in the alpine, conditions remain good, however—but Godbout-Gauthier said organizations like the SSISC need more eyes on the ground to know more about how healthy the environment is. Lucky for them, there are lots of outdoorsy folks in the region.
“We rely on what we call community science because we need other eyes on the ground," she said.
“I think of them as adventurers in general—to play outside is very useful. We love to get in touch with them because they tend to be into nature anyway; if we can put a bug in their ear that there’s some intruders they can keep an eye out for, they can let us know.”
More data means a better environment, and the adventurous folks can help preserve the area by reading up on invasive species.
“Being curious about the flora that’s around us and recognizing invasive wildflowers is really the first step to helping stop their spread,” said Godbout-Gauthier.
“So by recognizing invasive wildflowers people can act as our eyes on the ground to help us better understand the distribution of those plant species. It’s a question of community science—they can help with information, help inform prioritization and help inform a plan of attack for later on. In that sense, plant identification is really the first step, and with that comes the ability to report them.”
Hikers can download apps such as iNaturalist, or go through the SSISC website to report sightings of invasive species taking root in the region. The iNaturalist app teaches users about what sort of flora they are looking at, and can alert users to whether it’s invasive or native. Data collected can be used by SSISC.
“From the user's end it's a neat way to understand what you’re looking at, and for the scientists that use that data it’s beneficial obviously,” Godbout-Gauthier said.
For those with green thumbs who want to get involved, Pique asked the devil’s advocate question: Why not just pull out invasive species when you see it?
Godbout-Gauthier cautioned against just ripping out any invasive species you see, whether it be around town, on a trail or in the backcountry.
“For one, you may or may not be on land where you’re allowed to do that,” she said.
“It’s very important to get the permission of the landowner or manager before taking things into your own hands, because it's also their responsibility to handle that. We don’t want any vigilante, guerrilla gardening happening.
“The second thing is that it might not actually be effective—depending on the plant, it may be detrimental. Some plants have root systems such that they can start again from just a fragment of root, and then they come out with a vengeance. By pulling out one plant you may be doing more damage than otherwise. Then the question is what are you going to do with this plant that you just pulled up? If you were to dispose of it responsibility you have to take it with you, and odds are that may not happen.”
Instead, Godbout-Gauthier asked eager locals to lean in to what the SSISC does best.
“When you spot something invasive, instead of taking things into your own hands and pulling it up, you should report it," she said. "It’s an incentive for us and other folks to go and look into it and get a better sense of the plant distribution. It might allow us to discover that it's a bigger problem than we thought, which we wouldn’t have found out about if you’d just pulled a plant and kept it to yourself.”
Actions to take today
While the region is host to immense biodiversity in wildflowers, there are also many different invasive plants creeping into the region.
The SSISC doesn’t want to blast everyone with warnings about everything all the time, so Godbout-Gauthier said instead, they focus their messaging on plants at different times of the year.
Outdoor recreators don’t have to do much to help out, besides reporting.
“There’s also steps that people can take whether they know if there’s invasive species around or not, such as cautionary, preventative steps," she said. "There’s a program called ‘play, clean, go’ that targets people who play outside, whether it's hiking, horseback riding, dog walking, mountain biking—the goal is to play, clean your gear to make sure there’s no plant parts or plant seeds, and then go on your merry way to your next adventure.
“Those are preventative. Whether you know you’ve encountered an invasive plant on your hike or not, it's just good practice. It's fairly low effort and easy to do. Anyone can do it.”
The SSISC works with partners across the Sea to Sky, and closely here in Whistler, where while the draw of wildflowers is hard to measure in tourism, it still plays a part in the quality of the natural environment around us.
“There’s no ecotourism if there’s no eco to look at, and not just look at but experience,” said Godbout-Gauthier.
“Culturally it has a huge impact, and there would be huge repercussions to lose that. I’m not sure you can disentangle the Whistler community from its surrounding environment. It's our responsibility as a community to sustain the environment.”
