Thanks for sharing the link, Snowbrushy.
Here's a bit of the text from the Guardian article and the NPS video with it. The ranger narrator is pretty excited about it. Maybe some of our folks are down there now and will post a trip report soon. ~zParts of Death Valley, the driest place in North America, have exploded in a riot of color with a rare “superbloom” of millions of wildflowers.
The flowers have blanketed the desert valley to an extent not seen since 2005. The bloom started in the southern part of the Californian wilderness and is now moving north, displaying colorful species including the golden evening primrose (Camissonia brevipes), notchleaf phacelia (Phacelia crenulata) and fields of desert gold (Geraea canescens).
...
The unusual spectacle, unofficially dubbed a superbloom, has been triggered by a series of storms in October that brought heavy rainfall to parts of the park, including a burst of 3in of rain in just five hours. Death Valley normally averages just 2in of rain a year.
This rainfall, which the National Park Service has attributed to El Niño conditions that have soaked parts of California, has transformed a landscape that has a beauty usually considered a little more stark, featuring salt flats, sand dunes and scrub.
I remember thinking, when El Nino set up and there was so much rain in California in the Fall, that this might be the year for superbloom
I look forward to retirement when I can up and go at a moments notice and experience this
We visited in 2005 the last 'superbloom' and it was outstanding. I have been following posts in a Yahoo group "Where to photograph in California" which is really a group focused on wildflowers. They have been talking about the bloom. It sounds like it might be wrapping up right now (moving north and higher).
The area right now that is outstanding is the western slopes of the Southern Sierras (Tehachapi north to east of Fresno (hwy 168). The hills are golden with California poppies. Interestingly the bloom forecast for Antelope Valley and east side of the Valley is not so good.
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