Saturday Special: Highway Sunflowers

Now and then I experience something so inspiring, I can't keep my fingers off the keyboard. And of course I need to share it with my friends.

Photo by Yoshi Sugimoto on Unsplash

We've just finished a two-day drive across Nevada, from Minden to Salt Lake City. Over 400 miles of landscape that changes from desert playa to pinion forest to rabbit brush seas of gold to mountains with skiffs of early snow to ponds and valleys blessed with rain for the first year after a long drought. An added kick to our daily drives around home has been the sunflowers along our roads. So many this year, but then we got a real surprise in Utah.

As soon as we crossed the Salt Flats, famous for car designers testing out their vehicles against time, we entered the rolling hills between Knolls and Grantsville. Along the road, sunflowers grew in swaths that, at first, made us think someone had purchased bales of seeds and flung them, joyously, out the car window in passing. As the sunflowers thickened into masses on both sides of Interstate 80 and down the middle divider, we realized this is way beyond an individual's resources to accomplish. Indeed, the person(s) must have been channeling Johnny Appleseed in planting these thickets of sunny, wonderful blooms.

Or maybe it was the State of Utah highway department, or perhaps an individual or league of individuals connected with them to merge resources, time, and will to beautify the highway in this way. Why, in this era of Federal budget woes and battles, use public funds to plant a bunch … a really big bunch … of sunflowers?

Well, apparently, sunflowers have many benefits to humans and wildlife as food. Beyond that, however, sunflowers' deep roots dig into the soil, sequestering residual nitrogen and other nutrients for crop growth. Those deep roots also do a gangbuster job of holding the soil in place.

(You can read about sunflowers and learn more than you thought you wanted to know here.)

AHA! Now it all makes sense.

Thus, soil erosion must be the prime reason a department of highway maintenance would spend the money on sunflower seeds. And there was an even more dramatic proof this reason behind this project.

When we drove passed the Kennecott Copper Smelter, the steep hillsides were covered  with sunflowers. Not only did it bring a bright, cheery aspect to this otherwise dreary place, with its moraines of black slag and collection of ancient smelter buildings, pipes, and graffiti'ed railroad cars, planting these flowers would prevent the soils from collapsing as they exceed their angle of repose. As a wet cycle in the weather patterns increases the chance of more rain and snow, these fragile sedimentary mountainsides will have an additional and environmentally prudent ally to support them.

Bravo! Whoever you are who made this happen, BRAVO! I'm very happy that my tax money may be going to projects like this.

Sorry, I didn't get any photos. My cell phone camera would never have done justice to these scenes of beauty.

If you enjoyed reading this piece and would like to see more, please check out the Ring Around the Basin Archive.