Outdoors

Seattle brothers create guide to seeing Pacific Northwest wildflowers all summer long

By Molly Gilmore Contributing writer

The seasonal bounty of blossoms and buds might feel all too short-lived, but for hikers, spring wildflowers are blooming somewhere in the state all summer and into the fall.

“You can find wildflowers in Washington between April and October,” said Nathan Barnes, author of “Washington Wildflower Hikes: 50 Destinations.” “It depends on where you want to go. In the mountains, the spring is driven by the snow levels. If you are just on the edge of the snow line, that’s where you’ll find the wildflowers.”

Barnes and his brother, Jeremy Barnes, who takes the photos for the pair’s well-regarded hiking guides, are paying a virtual visit Tuesday to Browsers Bookshop to talk about the guidebook and their “Pacific Northwest Wildflowers: A Pocket Reference,” both released in April.

Eager to frolic through the flowers? The closest option is also the book’s easiest: Mima Mounds.

“It’s more of a walk than a hike,” Nathan Barnes said. “It’s almost like a garden of wildflowers where you can take a leisurely walk.”

Other flower-filled options are going to require more driving. Also classified as easy, but a bit more rugged, is Ebey’s Landing on Whidbey Island.

Not surprisingly, though, Barnes has a particular fondness for the parks around Mount Rainier.

“Grand Park is spectacular,” he said. “Spray Park is also pretty awesome. They’re incredibly popular and breathtaking in their scope. They’re more difficult to get to than some other ones, but when things are easy, they tend to be very crowded.”

“Wildflower Hikes” suggests a back route to Grand Park, which is not only shorter but also generally less traveled, he said — something that might be more important than usual.

“This season, we’re going to see a lot of people on the trails,” he said. “With the pandemic sort of winding down and people getting vaccinated, we’re going to see parking lots bursting with folks who have pent-up ‘I want to get outside’ energy.”

The Barnes brothers, both of Seattle, know that energy well. They’ve covered — and documented — a lot of ground since 2009, when they began sharing their adventures on their website, Hiking With My Brother.

They collaborated on two previous guidebooks, 2019’s “Alpine Lakes Wilderness: The Complete Hiking Guide” and 2014’s “Hiking through History Washington: Exploring The Evergreen State’s Past By Trail.”

And their hiking history goes back a lot further than that.

“We had young parents who didn’t have tons of money, and in the summers, we spent a lot of time hiking,” Nathan Barnes said. “It was kind of a go-to thing.”

Wildflowers and other plants were a frequent focus of the hiking and camping trips he, Jeremy and sister Emily took with their mom, Diane Barnes, during their childhood in Portland.

“My grandfather was Theodore Van Veen, who was a world-renowned rhododendron grower,” Nathan said. “My mom grew up working in the rhododendron nursery, and she had an affinity for plants.”

After college, Nathan and Jeremy truly took their outdoor adventures to another level. “My brother decided that what we needed to do was climb Mount Rainier,” Nathan said. “I was not enthused about this plan at the time, but we spent about a year training, and we did make it up to the top in 2008.”

By that time, the brothers had developed a hike habit, going out once or twice every week. “We thought, ‘We’re in great shape. Why don’t we just keep going?’ ” Nathan said.

So they began working their way through Harvey Manning and Ira Spring’s “55 Hikes Around Snoqualmie Pass” and started Hiking With My Brother to keep track of where they’d gone and what they’d done.

“We wrote every week, and it spiraled from there,” Nathan said. “After a couple of years of doing it, we were starting to get rumblings about books.”

Now instead of choosing hikes from other people’s guidebooks, the pair hikes their way toward their own, following in the footsteps of Manning and Spring in more ways than one.

‘Washington Wildflower Hikes: 50 Destinations’

This story was originally published May 20, 2021 at 5:00 AM.

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