You’re up high now. Before you lies a blanket of snow that never melts. Under your boots, piles of detritus: large boulders and small stones that have fallen off the mountain and lie mingled with the sand. The soil is loose, unstable and poor in nutrients. And yet, even on this talus slope, plants manage to grow and tinge the gray scree green.
It’s the green of the pioneer plants: the first to have colonized this habitat, adapting themselves to the home they have chosen. Some have shrunk in size and formed dense clumps. Others have stretched out their roots to anchor themselves more firmly in the shifting soil. You have to be careful, too: what you see before you look like moss, but it isn’t. It’s called the campion (Silene), and has little pink flowers. It goes by another name, too: Marmot Bread. Cute, right?
