Now that weed occupies millions of acres. Squarrose knapweed is going to do the same here. They're on a rampage. These weeds scare the dickens out of me. Foremost among these is cheatgrass, which often precedes knapweed and skeletonweed and which has spread across the West literally like wildfire.
Cheatgrass greens up early in the season, but quickly turns to an inedible, combustible straw.
It gives the landscape a soft, hazy, dreamy look and a tendency to burst into flame. Because cheatgrass both causes and thrives on fire, it burns out native plant communities with unnatural speed. Steve Monsen has a theory on why this happened. Weeds favor disturbed areas, and the Utah range has been mightily disturbed for the last 130 years. More specifically, he considers the current weed invasion the latest symptom of the overgrazing that occurred between 1860-1880, when the pioneers finally started ranching in the Wasatch Range after spending decades barricaded in their small towns, besieged by the Utes.