This widespread showy paintbrush adds color to mountain meadows, trails, and roadsides. Look for the pitch-fork lobed red bracts often with a powdery covering, and often with lobed leaves beneath the colorful spike of flowers. Clusters of the 4–28-inch tall stems, usually branching, vary from green to dark reddish-purple, hairy (but not woolly) to hairless.

FLOWERS: June–October. The 1–6-inch long, densely woolly, bright-red spike, or “paintbrush,” isn’t from petals but the bracts that surround the small, yellowish-green, beak-like, tubular flowers. The lance-shaped, 3/4–1 3/8-inch long (20–35 mm) bracts are red to orange on the outer half and have 1–5 lobes with the central lobe the longest. The beak-like flower extends slightly to fully beyond the red sepal tube (calyx).

LEAVES: Alternate, 1–3-inches long (3–8 cm), lance-shaped to linear, usually mostly hairless; margins vary from entire at mid-stem to occasionally 3-lobed on the upper stem.

HABITAT: Dry to moist, rocky, loamy, alluvial soils, rocky slopes, fields, roadsides; mixed hardwood-conifer forests to subalpine meadows,.

ELEVATION: 6,000–12,150 feet.

RANGE: AK, AZ, CA, CO, ID, MT, NV, NM, ND, OR, UT, WA, WY.

SIMILAR SPECIES: Of the 21 species of Castilleja in NM, the deeply lobed, scarlet floral bracts help distinguish this species. Mountain Paintbrush, C. astromontana, in the western mountains of NM, has entire to shallow-lobed floral bracts and stems with loose hairs (not woolly or matted).

NM COUNTIES: Widespread throughout mountains of NM in mid- to high-elevation habitats: Bernalillo, Cibola, Catron, Colfax, Dona Ana, Harding, Lincoln, Los Alamos, McKinley, Moro, Otero, Rio Arriba, San Juan, San Miguel, Sandoval, Santa Fe, Sierra, Socorro, Taos, Torrance, Union.