While traveling to Waterton Lakes National Park of Canada, my head must have been in the gutter because the first time I saw Bear Grass flowers, I distinctly heard Broad City's Abbi & Ilana yelling "BEWBS" and then we all giggled.
I swear on a stack of Gideon's a mile high, despite growing up in the Pacific Northwest, I somehow had managed to have never seen Bear Grass before our trip to Alberta. The Canadian side of the Glacier National Park we had visited was in the process of recovering after a previous fire, and like a white lotus rising from the mud, Bear Grass flourished in the blackened landscape with flowers drooping heavily from the weight of the rain.
Down south across the border, more Bear Grass could be found in abundance in Glacier National Park.
To the west we found whole slopes of Mt. Spokane covered with Bear Grass, leading us to seek out a local volunteer that told us first that it's called "Bear Grass" (I knew that Bewb Flower couldn't have possibly been the name but I wished desperately it was so), and second that they are always around, but every 4-7 years Bear Grass pop up in droves like it is now on Mt. Spokane.
Without the rain, Bear Grass flowers stand tall and proud for the most part, and some look like long berries.
According to Russ Holmes:
Bear-grass is capable of surviving light and moderate fire and regrowth after fire and can serve an important role in soil erosion and site revegetation.
The sight of whole fields of Bear Grass, swaying incandescently in the sun is as Yee Sook Ree said in Better Off Dead: "Truly, a sight to behold."
