Tuesday's route took me through a narrow, sandy canyon where they buried a new crude oil pipeline last year. Their initial attempt at reclaiming the land atop their pipeline was a total failure, yielding nothing but a wide strip of cheatgrass.

For those not familiar with the arid west, cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) is a particularly nasty invasive weed. It spreads like crazy, thrives in dry places where native plants struggle to hang on, is almost totally unpalatable, and worst of all... loves to burn. And loves to grow where a fire has been. There are whole townships of Idaho and Nevada where the entire landscape has been changed simply because cheatgrass came in. And sagebrush lands that used to have small, restorative wildfires every 30-50 years now have all-consuming blazes every five to ten years.

And nothing left but cheatgrass.

So we were none too happy to see a huge swath of cheatgrass running through important wildlife habitat where the only thing keeping the sand that pretends to be soil from blowing away is the light cover of native plants.

So they reseeded.

As you can see, much of the pipeline is still cheatgrass.

That's that reddish brown you see clinging to the hillsides.

But, in places, their plantings have taken root, so to speak, and driven the cheatgrass out.

Besides the obvious good news that there's less cheatgrass to burn in the countryside, the seed mix of the company's planting was apparently designed for more of a prairie landscape. Yielding lots of pretty flowers that we almost never see, like...

coneflowers,

Lewis's flax,

and one I had to look up...

Firecracker penstemon.

All pretty, but not persistent enough to move out into new country on their own. On the way home, I stopped alongside the highway, seeded with a similar prairie mixture when it was rebuilt 25 years ago, to enjoy some other hardy non-natives: prairie penstemons.