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Old 12-16-2013, 10:28 PM
 
Location: White House, TN
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Near the permanent snow line, it often takes all summer and into the early fall to finish melting the snow. There may be a few weeks in September and early October where it's clear of snow. So, what kind of vegetation could survive being snow covered 95% of the year? Mosses, lichens perhaps?
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Old 12-17-2013, 03:09 AM
 
Location: Trondheim, Norway - 63 N
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If the snow melts in September and there are only a few weeks in September and early October without snow: Lichens yes probably, especially on rock with earlies snowmelt.
Otherwise depends on what temperatures there are in September. If there are already regular overnigh frost, then there will be almost no vegetation, at best lichens.

It's interesting hiking up on our Norwegian mountains, seeing the vegetation zones as one gets higher. From the mountain forest, which typically has mountain birch in Scandinavia, and seeing the trees become smaller and smaller and more contortet. Finally you are above the trees, but there can still be fairly lush alpine tundra reaching nearly 1 m tall, then up to the middle alpine tundra, where plants still cover most areas but only very low plants and often mosses, and finally the high alpine tundra with virtually no vegatetion, except some lichens on the rocks.
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Old 12-17-2013, 10:43 AM
 
Location: Top of the South, NZ
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NZ has a wide range of tussocks, grasses, summer flowering plants and lichens that survive up into the permanent ice zone.
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Old 12-17-2013, 03:03 PM
 
Location: Bothell, Washington
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We have some mountain areas here in Washington state like that. The end of the Mount Baker Highway in the North Cascades gets up to a place that is really popular for hiking and photography named Artist Point, at an elevation of close to 6,000 feet. That area gets some of the world's highest amounts of annual snowfall on average and so it takes a very long time for the snow to melt- it is usually not melted until late August or early September, with some cooler years seeing some snow remain all summer right into the next snow season.
Anyway I go up there quite frequently in the summers for hiking, and there is surprisingly a lot of vegetation- lots of heather, blueberries, even different wildflowers (I am no expert, not sure what many of them are) that bloom briefly after the late melt out not long before the next snows come.
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Old 12-17-2013, 04:34 PM
 
Location: East coast
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Salix arctica - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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