Monday, March 14, 2005
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Death Valley in rare full bloom

Ample winter rainfall spurs spectacular splash of color

Rosalie Faubion photographs a field of desert gold blooming Thursday at the southern end of Death Valley National Park. Faubion said she worked as a naturalist at Death Valley about 25 years ago, and this is the largest bloom she ever has seen there. Photo by Clint Karlsen. Terry Baldino, spokesman for Death Valley National Park, talks about some of the wildflowers that now can be seen around the park. Photo by Clint Karlsen. Wildlife photographer Ron Niebrugge of Seward, Alaska, photographs wildflowers in Death Valley on Thursday. Photo by Clint Karlsen. Golden evening primrose grows near Jubilee Pass at Death Valley National Park, where record rainfall has triggered what park employees are calling the largest wildflower bloom in 100 years. Photo by Ralph Fountain. A desert five-spot blooms at Ashford Mill in Death Valley. Photo by Ralph Fountain.

DEATH VALLEY, Calif. -- On the west side of Jubilee Pass, wide-eyed tourists snap photos in a field of yellow blossoms that spreads downhill into the hottest, driest place in North America.

It's Thursday morning at the south end of Death Valley National Park, and an unseasonably large crowd of visitors has turned out to enjoy what some experts are calling the most spectacular wildflower bloom in more than a century.

Paul Gilbert and Kate Graham flew from Vancouver, Canada, to Las Vegas to see the show. They drove the 118 miles to Death Valley on Wednesday in one of the last rental cars they could find on a NASCAR weekend, a PT Cruiser with Massachusetts plates.

Gilbert is a professional nature photographer. Graham provides the writing for his books.

"We are bloom hunters," Gilbert said. "This is probably the best bloom we've seen."

They planned their trip after reading weather reports and tracking the developing wildflower season on a Web site called DesertUSA.com.

From Death Valley, Gilbert and Graham were headed south to hunt wildflowers in Joshua Tree National Park and Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in California and Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and Saguaro National Park in Arizona. They hoped to cover about 2,000 miles in eight days, camping along the way.

Ron Niebrugge, a wildlife photographer from Alaska, is in the midst of a similar tour of the desert Southwest.

Until about two weeks ago, he planned to be in Washington, D.C., but he scrapped that trip when he heard about the Death Valley wildflowers.

"A once-in-a-lifetime bloom is a once-in-a-lifetime bloom," he said.

As he set up his tripod in a field of desert gold along California Route 178 Thursday morning, Niebrugge couldn't help but smile at the notion that he wasn't on vacation, but was at the office.

"I hate to call it work," he said. "I may not get rich doing it, but I live a rich lifestyle. If I won the lottery, this is what I'd be doing."

The true flower enthusiasts were easy to spot. They were the ones with telltale orange splotches of pollen on their shoes, their clothes and even their noses.

Tom and Anita Finley didn't come for the bloom, but that didn't stop them from enjoying it.

The husband and wife from Southern California were in Death Valley to celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary with a tour of Scotty's Castle, where Anita's parents spent their honeymoon in 1939.

"All this was just a spectacular surprise," Anita said as she took pictures of her colorful first trip to the park. "It's just incredible, a whole bunch of icing on the cake."

In drier years, finding wildflowers in Death Valley requires a keen eye. Now the flowers are impossible to miss. The once-brown hills are dusted yellow and green by millions of desert gold plants. Their sweet smell hits you the moment you step out of your car.

Near Badwater, the lowest spot on the continent, the yellow fades to purple as the desert gold is replaced by notch-leaf phacelia and desert sand verbena. Tall, white-blossomed gravel-ghosts also line the road as it snakes past the large, shallow lake that has formed in the shadow of the snow-capped Panamint Range.

But like spring itself in Death Valley, the flowers are not expected to linger. By the end of the month, the bloom will begin to wane on the valley floor as daytime temperatures climb into the triple digits.

"The south end is probably peaking now," said Terry Baldino, spokesman for the park.

The blossoms are expected to spread north in the coming days, reaching their peak in the area around the Furnace Creek visitor center in a week or two and at Scotty's Castle a few weeks after that.

"If you were to drive to Titus Canyon today, it's as green as can be but no flowers. It's still a little early there," Baldino said.

Where there are flowers, as many as 20 different species easily can be found on a single acre, Baldino said.

About 60 varieties of flowers are pictured in a $1 pamphlet the Park Service sells at the visitor center in Furnace Creek. Baldino said the pamphlet was printed using pictures from the last big bloom in 1998, but it sat on the shelf gathering dust during the string of dry years that followed.

"We couldn't give them away," he said.

Park Ranger Charlie Callagan said the enormous number of seeds produced during 1998 bloom set the stage for this year's display.

"This is a better bloom," Callagan said. "This is the best I think we've ever seen. You might not see another bloom like this in your lifetime."

The current crop includes several plant species that haven't bloomed in almost a decade.

One of them is the goldcarpet, a small green plant that hugs the ground and puts out tiny yellow flowers. During a severe drought in the 1920s and 1930s, the plant failed to appear for so long that botanists began to suspect it was gone for good, Callagan said.

Another rare species now in bloom is the Death Valley sticky ring, also known as the wetleaf spiderling. Baldino said the plant probably was common 10,000 years ago when a giant lake covered much of Death Valley. Now it blooms only when enough rain falls to wash away the waxy coating on its seeds, which can lie dormant in the ground for decades.

"It's a plant that likes a lot of water. Obviously, it doesn't get that very often," Baldino said.

Death Valley averages less than 2 inches of rain a year. So far this year, a total of more than 3 inches of rain has fallen at Furnace Creek, where the park's official rain gauge has recorded more than 6 inches of rain since July 1.

Baldino said the bloom and the record rain that triggered it have been featured by several newspapers and network news broadcasts, and more coverage is on the way.

Even first lady Laura Bush stopped to smell the flowers in Death Valley during a March 4 hiking expedition with friends.

All of the publicity has turned a normally busy time for the park into a zoo.

"The phone, we can't even get to it," Baldino said. "It's been ringing off the hook."