Death Valley National Park, known as the driest place in North America, is currently filled with wildflowers after conditions encouraged long-dormant seeds to sprout, park officials said. The superbloom has visitors flocking to see a landscape that is usually brown and harsh transform into fields of gold and purple.
Park ranger Matthew Lamar said the bloom is the best Death Valley has seen since 2016, attributing it to steady rainfall and warm temperatures in the last six months. “This landscape that sometimes people think of as desolate or devoid of life is coming alive right now with this really beautiful palette of colors,” Lamar said.
The National Park Service said Death Valley received nearly a year’s worth of rain since October and experienced its wettest November on record, with 1.76 inches (4.47 centimeters) of rain. Park officials said that rainfall helped seeds buried in the soil break through the surface, producing the colorful bloom.
The wildflowers include what the report described as the “desert sunflower,” plus purple phacelia, brown-eyed primrose and the pink desert five-spot. Visitors have been stopping along the park’s roads and near landmarks for a view of the flowers, including areas near the Furnace Creek Visitor Center.
Ecologists said the superbloom counters a misconception that deserts have no life. Loralee Larios, a plant ecologist at the University of California, Riverside, said the plants and animals develop strategies to persist in a system marked by extremes, saying, “The plants and the animals have developed really amazing strategies to be able to persist, and especially in a system like Death Valley that’s really sort of characterized by extremes.”
Tiffany Pereira, an ecologist and associate research scientist at the Desert Research Institute, said desert plants can go decades without water, waiting for the perfect conditions for seeds to germinate. Jackie Gilbert, a Las Vegas resident who visited specifically to see the bloom, said the resilience of the plants stood out to her. “It’s a good reminder that even in the face of all this adversity, that they can still thrive,” Gilbert said.
Park officials stressed that the opportunity to see the flowers is short-lived. They said fields of flowers on the park’s lower elevations are expected to remain until mid-to-late March, depending on weather, while higher elevations are expected to blossom from April through June.
To help visitors find blooms, park officials said visitors can check a poster outside the visitor center for recommended viewing areas. In early March, the report said fields of wildflowers were blooming just north of the visitor center and south along Badwater Road, and that Ashford Mill, about an hour’s drive from the visitor center, was also “bursting with color,” Lamar said.
Ecologists and rangers also cautioned visitors to stay on designated trails and avoid trampling the plants. The report said picking the flowers is prohibited, and touching the purple phacelia could cause skin irritation, noting that plucking flowers reduces the number of seeds available for future generations.
Visitors are also being asked to watch their step for sphinx moth caterpillars scattered across the desert floor, the report said. Lamar said the current bloom is a rare chance to experience Death Valley’s transformation and that the timing may not repeat soon.
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