Poetry on Table Rock

     If July is the best time for wildflowers in the Siskiyou Mountains, spring—now—is the best time for flowers on the Table Rock Mountains, flat-topped, low-elevation, geologically interesting formations outside of Medford, Oregon. Both Upper and Lower Table Rock are famous for their masses and varieties of wildflowers. Usually the Bureau of Land Management and the Nature Conservancy, who co-manage the area, lead wildflower hikes at this time of year. This year because the pandemic has prevented those walks, the Nature Conservancy has encouraged individuals to hike there by posting poems by local poets along the trails.

    One of my poems, "These Days of Spring," is on the Upper Table Rock trail. I wanted to see how it looked and also to read the other poems and to witness the flowers, so a few days ago I left the house at 6:00am and was on the trail by 7:15.

   The trail led gently uphill through woods of oaks, firs, and madrones, on the floor of which were carpets of fawn lilies, with occasional accents of scarlet-red fritillaria and blue hound's tongue, then stripes of yellow buttercups. The birds were singing from tree-tops. Such a chorus for an early-morning hike!

Fawn lilies

   I also saw desert parsley, fiddleheads, blue-eyed Mary, ookow, buttercups, popcorn flower, larkspur, and mountain lupine. If I hadn't stopped off the trail, carefully avoiding the poison oak, to give plenty of space for a couple of hikers to pass, I would have missed the rush lily in the woods.

The trail is wide enough 
for the hiker to avoid poison oak.

    When I paused to read my poem on its placard by the trail and read its last two lines—"Gathering all the glory on the wing/A bird's song colors air. These days of spring"—I lifted my head and heard the birds, the perfect combination of poetry and experience. Reading about the turkey vulture in Dan Kaufman's poem at an overlook, I kept expecting to see a vulture soaring in the distance. And Pepper Trail's five haiku were written on Table Rock, so they evoked exactly where I was.

    From the wide, flat expanse of the top of Upper Table Rock, snow-peaked Siskiyou Mountains rickracked the distant horizon. Desert parsley yellowed the ground. 

Desert parsley and snowy Siskiyous

In the distance I could see a white tower of some sort and imagined it as a religious or ritual tribute to Table Rock. I was curious enough to decide to walk to it.

    To save you the hour's walk, in case you hike there and have the same curiosity, I will tell you that it is an ugly government tower with huge Keep Off signs. I could have saved myself the extra hour's walk by simply looking for information on Wikipedia later, which told me, after I got home, that it is a 25-foot tall very high frequency omnidirectional range aviation tower. In other words, a practical thing for navigation, but far from the lovely steeple I had imagined.

ORA tower

    Other than the tower, the hike was nothing but beauty—the flowers, the views, the woods, and the poems. If you live in or near the Rogue Valley, go to the Table Rock trails this April both to see the wildflowers and to read the poems. You're in for a treat.

Another view from the top