Bear grass boom: There’s still time to see these unpredictable, showy white blooms up on Mount Spokane – if you’re quick

There are times, Mount Spokane Park Ranger Scott Hupp said, when he feels like a Disney princess.

When the park manager isn’t searching for a lost hiker, monitoring a brushfire burning near the park, picking up stray granola bar wrappers or issuing citations for picking wildflowers, an eye-catching and unpredictable bloom offers a reprieve for parkgoers and employees alike.

Finicky, the bear grass plant takes its sweet time to shoot a bloom. Every five years or so, the flowers have a strong showing in the subalpine slopes of Mount Spokane. Its tall white flowers overtake meadows, almost giving the impression of snow.

“Sometimes I feel like a Disney princess because you’re in a field of flowers and butterflies and bees,” Hupp laughed.

The plant itself takes at least five years to produce a flower, and when it does, it’s impossible to miss. This year, Hupp said, has been one of the best blooms in his five years working at the park.

The flowers grow some 3 to 5 feet from the earth on a thick, hollow stalk. Small white flowers climb the stalk until ballooning into a large white orb made up of dozens of the delicate, trumpet-shaped flowers.

“It’s such an exquisite bulb when it’s in full bloom, it almost looks fake,” Hupp said.

Plant ecologist Andrea Thorpe, a natural resources program manager for the state parks system, said the bear grass was looking particularly “gorgeous” when she visited Mount Spokane a couple weeks ago when the blooms were at their peak. She described “multitudes of white flowers as far as the eye can see.”

“It’s just really showy and pretty and tends to be in spectacularly pretty places,” she said.

Bear grass only grows in subalpine regions in Western states. In the Inland Northwest, it is most prolific on the peaks of the Selkirk Mountains that the state park envelops. It’s also been spotted in the higher elevation areas of northeast Washington, Thorpe said.

It blooms from early June to July in Mount Spokane, and the flowers are already beginning to wane.

Bear grass grows in meadows and along the extensive trail system of the park. Bunches of the plant are best seen along trail 130, especially on a segment headed up to the 5,250-foot peak of Mount Kit Carson in the park. It also grows in colonies in the campground at Bald Knob and in a large sloping meadow under ski lift chair 6.

Despite the name, bear grass isn’t grass at all, but a member of the lily family.

Bear grass is a perennial. After a plant flowers, the visible parts “die” while its reproductive rhizomes in the soil live on, going on to produce more clumps of grass called rosettes. After at least another five years, each rosette will give off another bloom.

Because of this reproductive cycle, multiple flowers emerging from a meadow could be part of the same plant, similar to how aspen trees grow in colonies, Thorpe said.

It’s near impossible to know when it’s going to be a good year for bear grass blooms until they start in early June, Hupp said.

“I’ve heard a lot of different rumors or legends like it’s every three years, every seven, every five,” Hupp said.

Thorpe said a good bloom depends on the weather in years prior.

“What triggers flowering is some combination of temperature and rainfall. There’s some thought in the past that they flower every seven years, and that’s not quite true,” Thorpe said. “It’s just that it takes quite a while and depends on climatic factors.”

The plant is liable to bloom when it gets enough rainfall and soil moisture, according to the National Forest Service, not quite on a strict cycle humans can predict.

That’s part of the appeal, Hupp said.

The plants aren’t just enjoyed by two-legged occupants of the park. Deer and moose like to munch on the flowers; amid clumps of the lanky stalks are some broken stems, evidence of an ungulate’s lunch.

They’re frequented by pollinators like bees and other insects that cling to the orbs as they sway in the mountain breeze.

Since much of the plant’s reproductive system grows underground, it’s pretty hardy in the event of a fire. Rhizomes will spit out more grassy clumps soon after a blaze, Hupp said, helping with erosion control.

While some bear grass blooms will grace the trails and meadows every year, this year’s bloom at Mount Spokane is particularly impressive, Hupp said. It’s certainly waning from peak blooms, but parkgoers will likely have another week or two to soak up the flowers of the unpredictable plant.

Aside from bear grass, other wildflowers are also springing up in full force in the park. Growing much closer to the earth than the towering white orbs are a sprinkling of flaming red Indian paintbrush, blankets of shaggy hawkweed just beginning to spit its yellow flowers and purple lupin still lingering from its late-spring bloom.

Though tempting even to law enforcer Hupp, picking or cutting nonedible wildflowers on state parks is a misdemeanor offense in Washington.

“I would encourage visitors to definitely go up and visit and see the blooms,” Thorpe said. “Just please don’t pick the flowers, leave with just pictures.”