For fifty years, David Inouye has returned to the same cabin in a remote Colorado meadow to study the ecology of high altitude mountain flowers and the humming birds they attract.

“I’ve done a lot of growing up in this valley,” says the ecologist. “I first came out here in 1971. Part of it was the scale of living in the shadow of a 12,000-foot mountain.”

He explains how he and other graduate students first arrived in the early seventies at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado, to collaborate on a study of native wildflowers and pollinators.

“Fifty-three years later, we’re still coming back,” he says. Now though, it’s with his family, including his 13-year-old granddaughter who’s seen in this documentary working side by side with him, and learning how to track nature through time.

Her name is Miyoko and she appears to revel in the environment.

“People know a lot more about the world now than we did like when my dad was growing up, or when my grandfather was, like, starting research out here,” she says. I feel like they both saw the importance about looking at the world in a different way than we normally do. We need the expertise and the knowledge, and the history that older generations have and that they can give to us. But young people need to be willing to accept the knowledge and they need to be willing to do work.”

This intergenerational collaboration and mentorship reminds us of a “A Forest Conversation,” a Wendell Berry essay in which he discusses the importance of generational knowledge transfer in fields like ecology and forest management in order to begin to appreciate changes that occur over decades and generations rather than seasons or even years.