What comes in shades of chartreuse, slate-grey or elegant orange, can be crusty or hair or shrub-like, and brandishes common names like sockeye scale, Colorado rockfrog and peppered pixie-cup?

It’s got to be a lichen.

Several of these diminutive, underappreciated, and often overlooked members of the Fungal Kingdom stand out more than others, but there are actually over a thousand species of lichens in the Rockies!

Lichens come in an array of shapes and sizes, from the microscopic powder species to the macroscopic leaf varieties. Up to 30 different species of lichens can be found on a single tree, even more if the conditions are right. But lichens aren’t restricted to trees. They can be found on bare rock, soil, the debris-littered forest floor, and in habitats ranging from the desert to the Arctic tundra to everywhere in between.

Exactly what is a lichen? More than just a pretty puffball, it’s a fungus that has taken up farming. The fungus provides the residence, or support system for the food-producing algae. This mutually-beneficial relationship culminates in one of the myriad of lichen species.

One of the most obvious species of lichens is the brilliant greenish-yellow wolf lichen, Letharia vulpina. Its chartreuse colouration is a sharp contrast to the dark branches of the tree branches it graces.

Another readily identifiable species is Xanthoria elegans, or elegant orange. This crusty-looking, orange leaf lichen favours bare limestone rock, where it grows unimpeded at the astounding rate of around four centimetres every hundred years.

Hanging off spruce branches, like tinsel on a Christmas tree, are the hair lichens – Bryoria, Alectoria and Usnea – more commonly called Witches’ Hair and Old Man’s Beard. Bryoria is a dark-coloured lichen, brown to black, hanging in clumps and resembling the unruly mop of a witch. Alectoria and Usnea are greenish-grey to yellowish, like the beard of a pipe-toting octogenarian. These last two can be identified by gently pulling on a strand. Usnea has an elastic inner cord that can be separated from the outer sheath; Alectoria doesn’t.

In the past, lichens have been used as medicine and dyes, for fermenting beer, and as smoking tobacco. One species of Bryoria was even used by First Nations people in B.C. as a food source. But, as a hiker, the best reason I can think of for liking lichens is the excuse they give you stop and catch your breath on the way up a steep slope – “just checking out these peppered pixie-cups. I’ll be there in a minute!”

Think about it – who’s going to try and call your bluff on that one?