HABITATS

White spruce forest also includes paper birch and balsam poplar. The shrub layer has western rose, buffaloberry, northern comandra, and shrubby cinquefoil, while the ground is carpeted with both soft mosses and crunchy reindeer moss (actually a lichen). Canada goldenrod and northern bedstraw are among the few wildflowers.

"Drunken" forest consists mainly of black spruce, although there are also a few small willows. Common shrubs are shrubby cinquefoil, mountain cranberry, western rose, northern black currant, northern comandra, buffaloberry, and a dwarf raspberry. Along with a heavy ground cover of soft mosses are horsetails and such wildflowers as Ross's avens, bluebells, sweet coltsfoot, a grass-of-Parnassus, a fleabane, and various sedges.

Keno Hill roadside vegetation includes native forest species such as white and black spruce, alpine fir, gray alder, trembling aspen, and Scouler's willow. The creation of the road, however, has made an opening for other kinds of plants, including fescue, bent grasses, myriad leaf, a stinging nettle, western dock, and the colorful fireweed.

Wet meadows have abundant grasses, sedges, and rushes, while low-growing shrubs include black crowberry, mountain cranberry, shrubby cinquefoil, and three dwarf willows. Common wildflowers are a pink-flowered and a white-flowered bistort, Arctic shooting-star, three kinds of buttercups, Parrya nudicaulis, and Langsdorf's lousewort. Rare for the Yukon are the tiny moschatel, Sitka valerian, and Epilobium lactiflorum (a white-flowered, alpine willowherb).

Dry meadows have less species diversity than the wet meadows. Arctic willow and Labrador-tea make up the shrub population. There are three kinds of saxifrages, including the rare alpine saxifrage. The purple-headed Siberian aster is common.

Rocky summit species include the rather rare Huddleson's locoweed, a three- to four-inch-tall, hairy white plant that produces pink-to-purple flowers and oversize seed pods. Other rarities are the dwarf, shrubby Diapensia lapponica, whose solitary creamy white flowers are borne above a cushion of evergreen leaves, and Lapland poppy, whose yellow flowers appear on leafless stalks nearly ten inches above the basal leaves. Among the common wildflowers are one-flowered cinquefoil, woolly lousewort, alpine willowherb, three saxifrages, and an Indian paintbrush. A mat-forming shrub known as white mountain heather has minute leaves crowded into four rows. The delicate fragile fern and the larger fragrant wood fern nestle in the crevices of the sheer cliff off the northern side of the summit.