Hi Deb, I really enjoyed your piece about fireweed. I love the stuff too, in all its various stages. When you mentioned the cottony fluff of its seeds, it immediately brought to mind a remote parcel survey I did years ago. The location of the project was up at Sherman, along the Alaska Railroad, about 31 miles north of Talkeetna. I think it must have been in late August, because the fireweed had gone to fluff. On one portion of the job, Doug Moore and I had to define a line across a long expanse of meadow, and unlike others parts of the property, where we cut the boundary lines through forest using a chainsaw, here we were faced with six to seven foot tall fireweed for several hundred feet.
Now as you can imagine, with a sharp machete, a guy can cut his way through fireweed at a pretty good pace, but even still, it took us both working quite a while on a very warm day to create the line across the meadow. To stay out of each other's way, we had used the instrument to set some high poles, for keeping ourselves on the right path, and Doug and I worked from opposite sides toward the middle. When we finally met, completing the brushed out boundary line, we took one look at each other and started laughing! Each of us was covered in fireweed fluff, head to toe, because we were sweating profusely, and the stuff stuck to our skin and our clothing. We joked that it probably looked like we had been feathered, if not tarred!