Part 1: The Valley Hunt (Early to Mid-Spring)

Every year around early spring, it starts with a glance at a neighbor's garden or a sudden pop of color on the side of a dirt road. The winter freeze breaks, the valley starts to warm up, and the race is officially on.

I love wildflowers. But I don’t hunt for them with a camera or a guidebook. To be honest, I already take way too many pictures, and I have absolutely zero interest in memorizing scientific Latin names. For me, there is a distinct allure to not knowing everything about a plant—just seeing something raw and beautiful in the dirt, wondering about it, and maybe giving it a custom nickname of my own.

Instead of a camera, I use a mental scoreboard.

Whenever I’m out on a walk, a bike ride, or a trail run by myself, I turn the landscape into a mental scavenger hunt. I keep a running tally in my head of how many different varieties I can spot. And yes, my rules are set: if two flowers look identical but one is pink and the other is white, they count as two different points on the board.

On a standard solo loop out at Three Peaks Recreation Area, I can usually bag between six and ten different varieties just hiding in the sagebrush. Another go-to favorite is the 13th Hole loop right behind the golf course—it never fails to drop a solid handful of unique blooms right along the singletrack.

This game is actually an old habit. Growing up, whenever I went hiking with my dad, we would spend the entire trail pointing out the wildflowers and counting the varieties together. It’s funny how a simple childhood tradition follows you into adulthood, turning a regular post-work workout into a game that gives me a perfect reason to hit the exact same trails week after week.

In the valley, the flowers are scrappy, hidden, and a fun challenge to track down. But as mid-spring turns into early summer, the valley heat starts to dry things up.

And that is exactly when the scavenger hunt shifts locations. (Stay tuned for Part 2, where we take the game up the canyon to find the massive, hidden fields of the high elevation...)