Blooming Fabulous!

Crested Butte Wildflower Fest 2023

By Dawne Belloise

Since 1986, the Crested Butte Wildflower Festival (CBWF) has been educating and guiding flower and nature lovers through the phenomena of the area’s prolific blooms. The CBWF is underway through July 16 with wildflower-based programs. 

It’s the height of wildflower season and this year has an incredibly stunning display with all species and colors in abundance. It’s easy to see why Crested Butte is officially designated as the Wildflower Capital of Colorado. The CBWF features an array of events that go beyond blossom gazing to encompass birding and butterflies, various mediums of art and photography workshops, and garden tours and lectures in geobotany. There are hikes, walks and jeep tours.

The CBWF divides up their events into seven umbrella categories: Art, Birding & Butterflies, Botany, Culinary & Medicinal, Geology & Geobotany, Photography and Hikes & Tours.  There’s also “Follow the Bloom” where the group leaders take the participants to see where the most magnificent blooms are, hiking to where to the best blooms are at the time of the event.

An interesting aspect of the CBWF guided tours is Geobotany, a combination of flower identification and geology that gives an understanding of why certain flowers grow in our area based on the geology and soil. Tour leader and geologist Dr. Amy Ellwein, aka Dr. Rock, explains, “In order to see a wide range of geology in four hours, you need a car,” so this is a van tour to enable coverage of more areas. JJ’s Jeeps, a Gunnison Valley tour and guide company owned by Jeremy Johnson, has teamed up with the CBWF and Dr. Ellwein for the geobotany tours to offer this new feature, as well as for other tours for the festival. 

Last week, CBWF board president Tom Zeiner said that the attendance was at pre-pandemic numbers and they were expecting more than 1,500 attendees. The events and tours are already more than 90% sold out. “We scaled back some during COVID but have been selectively adding events so we’re close to what we were pre-COVID. We had some great publicity from CBS Sunday Morning and some of the Denver TV stations that has really spiked interest. We had lots of poster sales and memberships after those broadcasts last year, and it seems to be carrying over to where people want to actually come out,” Zeiner said.

There are a couple of events that might work for younger children. The Tour of Crested Butte Gardens and the Wildflower ID Walk are both easier walks and allow parents with children to peel off from the group if needed. For hikes, the CBWF recommends Woods Walk since it’s shady and has tree forts. The Brush Creek hike, which is very flowery and easy to walk, is another, although it can be hot and sunny. 

With this year’s epic (and seemingly ceaseless) snowfall and late, cool spring and plentiful moisture, the blooms have been somewhat slowed. According to Zeiner, “We’re probably a couple weeks behind,” noting that they had checked out Rustler Gulch just before the festival began and that “the Osha and Larkspur were budding out and should be pretty spectacular (now). The late spring also meant really good blooms lower, as in Almont and around Brush Creek Valley. That’s pretty evident by the gold hillsides coming into town. The flowers coming into town look like they were planted by the town they’re so spectacular. Vinny Rossignol, who’s been watching the wildflowers for 40 years, pointed out that it seems like each plant is putting out lots more flowers than usual, contributing to the super bloom look.”

The lupines, in their purpleness, are climbing up to higher elevations as the season progresses, along with Indian paintbrush, mule’s ears, century plants and the columbines are clustered with larkspur with fields of alpine sunflowers stretched out over the viewscapes. Wherever you hike or drive in this impossibly beautiful landscape, you can’t go wrong on any path you choose to take here in Crested Butte. 

Most importantly, it’s imperative that wildflower admirers know the following: Stay on the roads when driving; do not drive onto delicate grounds, fields or private property, especially up at Rocky Mountain Biological Lab; and no picking the wildflowers because when people pick the flowers, they’re diminishing the next generation of plants and blooms and taking wildlife nutrients from deer, bears, bees and other pollinators. Whoever eats those flowers or whoever eats what’s eating the flowers, it’s all connected in a cycle. So please, enjoy our wildflowers but leave them where they belong – in the wild, and leave the wilderness as you found it, with no trace of you being there.

For more information and a full schedule, description of events, to register or become a member, visit crestedbuttewildflowerfestival.org.