You gotta' give Alberta credit for having a nice motto on their license plates: Wild Rose Country. But actually, wild roses are all over the place in the northern Rockies. (Perhaps they even take in a wider territory than that.)
June is the month for them. Don't wait too long -- they fade pretty quickly. Their colors are most vivid when the blooms first open up. I like how this photo shows blooms of different 'newnesses':
Sometimes the wild roses clump into 'flocks' of one hundred. At some point you can stand away from them and smell them. Is there any fragrance more delightful?!
But why are overpowering good or bad odors so rare for human beings? It seems like most animals are drastically superior to homo sapiens in their ability to detect odors. If you argued that olfactory ability is an essential tool for being a successful hunter, that doesn't really answer the question, because humans lived by hunting and gathering up to a few thousand years ago. A time span that brief didn't produce any evolutionary changes in our anatomy and physiology.
To illustrate my point, take my little dog. She bolted out the trailer door at a new campsite and ran directly to a spot in the trees, and then emerged with a dead mouse in her mouth. Binocular targeting with her nose? How could a dog seem so human in some situations, and be so different in other situations?
In my next life I am going to learn some biology!
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