The spurs were too long. The color was wrong—a pale buttercream rather than the standard blue. The leaves were fuzzier, almost silvery. He collected a single specimen, pressed it carefully, and sent it to the New York Botanical Garden.
But in —the same month Apollo 11 landed on the moon—the Fennimores made their own small discovery. High on the northwest flank of Mount Rosa , Eleanor sat down to rest on a boulder. Looking down between her boots, she saw it: a cluster of six pale yellow blooms, each with impossibly long, straight spurs.
Charles Schnurr found it once. The Fennimore family found it again. And today, thanks to careful stewardship, this pale, spiky jewel continues to bloom in the cold wind, reminding us that sometimes the rarest things are hiding right where we’ve already looked—if only we look closer. "In the end, it wasn't a grant or an institution that saved it," Margaret Fennimore-Torres says. "It was a family who loved a mystery more than a vacation." Have you seen an unusual high-altitude columbine? Contact the Colorado Native Plant Society at [email protected]. schnurr columbine
They had found the Schnurr Columbine, alive and thriving, in a micro-habitat less than 200 square feet. The rediscovery was kept secret for five years to prevent poaching. Eventually, the Fennimores worked with the U.S. Forest Service to protect the site. Today, the exact location remains undisclosed to the public, though a small interpretive sign at the Pikes Peak Highway overlook mentions the flower's story.
By the 1960s, the Schnurr Columbine was unofficially considered extinct. This is not the end of the story. Enter the Fennimore family of Colorado Springs. David Fennimore, a high school biology teacher, had read Schnurr’s original 1931 paper as a graduate student. He became obsessed. Every summer, he dragged his reluctant wife, Eleanor, and their two teenage children up treacherous slopes with a tattered copy of Schnurr’s hand-drawn map. The spurs were too long
The verdict? A natural, stable variant—unique to the Pikes Peak massif. In 1931, it was formally named Aquilegia schnurrii in his honor. Here is where the story takes a somber turn. After its discovery, the Schnurr Columbine was never found again. For nearly 40 years, botanists scoured the Pikes Peak region. Expeditions returned empty-handed. The type specimen—the single dried plant in New York—became a ghost. Many concluded that the original population had been destroyed by a rockslide or over-collecting.
By J. Peterson
"I didn't scream," Eleanor recalled in a 1995 interview. "I just whispered, 'David, come look at this.' He crawled on his hands and knees for ten minutes before he spoke. Then he cried."