Botanist extols virtues of wilderness flowers

Maria Mantas calls the six years she spent in the Bob Marshall Wilderness in the 1980s “the best years of her life.”

Mantas was a seasonal biologist for the Forest Service, studying and cataloguing the many and varied plants in the wilderness. She grew up in Illinois and knew even in her youth that the urban environment wasn’t for her.

“My dream was to be a wildlife biologist,” she said last week.

Her career began with studying grizzly bears, but that field work also included studying what bears ate. Since a grizzly’s diet is mostly plants, the work led to her love of botany.

Mantas became the Flathead National Forest’s first full-time botanist, a post she held for 12 years. She later worked as science director for the Nature Conservancy of Montana, and last year became the director of the Swan Ecosystem Center, a nonprofit community group in the Swan Valley.

The Bob Marshall Wilderness has a multitude of flowering plants, from arnica on the forest floor to sky pilot on the highest peaks.

In a talk she presented at a Flathead Chapter of the Native Plant Society meeting last week, Mantas said the best time to view flowers in the Bob is June for the valleys and July and August for the high country as the snow recedes.

One of her favorite areas is the Flathead Alps, a remote region of jagged peaks just east of the Big Prairie Ranger Station.

“It’s where my heart is,” Mantas said of the wilderness, reciting a saying by colleague Wendel Hann. “It’s not the east side or the west side, — it’s the inside.”