DEATH VALLEY ALIVE

Yellow blossoms cover the rocky earth -- a loose-weave quilt draped across the hottest, driest spot in North America.

The bloom is back in some areas of Death Valley National Park, and experts agree it's a pretty good show.

Nancy Hadlock, education specialist for the park, said this year's wildflower crop is among the best in a decade.

"It's much better than last year, when we didn't have much of a bloom at all," she said.

You just have to know where to look, said ranger and naturalist Charlie Callagan.

"It's pretty isolated, but where the flowers are they're looking really nice," he said. "The pocket of flowers that are out there are really showy."

One of the best spots is conveniently located right at the park entrance nearest to Las Vegas. Just pull over at the park entrance sign, about 100 miles west of Las Vegas on California Highway 190, and walk to the other side of the flood berm on the northeast side of the road, Callagan said.

"The secret is to get out and walk around. Then you'll see another dozen species of wildflower."

The largest concentration of flowers can be found along one side of Highway 190 as it winds north from the park visitors center at Furnace Creek, about 130 miles west of Las Vegas.

There, patches of desert gold form crooked fingers that point east toward the bleached foothills of the Amargosa Range. In their green and yellow pattern, you can almost trace where rain fell and collected over the past five months.

Forget April showers; to make the desert bloom, you need rain in fall and winter. And not just any precipitation will do. Hadlock said the plants need good, soaking rains, "not just drizzles and not floods."

A single storm on Sept. 22 dropped a little more than six-tenths of an inch of rain on Furnace Creek, which averages of 1.9 inches a year.

Since then, the park's official weather station has logged another inch of precipitation from weather systems that passed through in November, December, January and February.

More than 3 inches of rain fell in Death Valley during the first three months of 2005, adding to an already wet period that saw almost twice the normal amount of rainfall over the final six months of 2004.

The resulting bloom is considered the largest in a century and the one against which all future blooms will be measured.

Some of the flowers that bloomed in 2005 hadn't been seen in the park for more than a decade.

Hadlock said the hardiest seeds can lie in wait for 10 to 20 years or more, sealed beneath special coatings that are washed away only when soaked with the right amount of rain or eaten by a specific kind of insect or bird.

When conditions are just right, a few varieties will bloom, produce seeds and start to fade in as a little as two days. The brown-eyed evening primrose blooms for a single night and starts making seeds "within a matter of hours," Hadlock said.

Most of Death Valley's wildflowers are more patient, but none of them will last too long.

"If it gets hot quickly, they could go really fast," Hadlock said.

Callagan thinks the current bloom on the valley's floor could peak in a week or two.

As temperatures warm, the show should move gradually to higher elevations, so long as the weather was right in those areas over the past few months.

It's hard to predict exactly where wildflowers will appear next because it is impossible to track every drop of rainfall in the 3.4 million acre park, on the border of California and Nevada.

Two popular spots that did get rain and could see some flowers are Dante's View and Ubehebe Crater.

A large bloom can mean big business for merchants in and around the park.

Phil Dickinson is director of sales and marketing for the Furnace Creek Inn and Ranch Resort, which offers 290 rooms from $120 to more than $400 a night.

"Ordinarily, March and April are going to be busy even in the worst of circumstances," he said. "But it's fair to say we like flowers out here. It makes the difference between good months and outstanding months."

Dickinson said what's going on now is "not by any stretch of the imagination anywhere near what it was in 2005.

"It probably won't be (like that) again in my lifetime. We were absolutely overrun. There wasn't a room to be found at the inn or the ranch."

This year's bloom might not compare to that one, but David Blacker, executive director of the Death Valley Natural History Association, said it is still well worth the trip.

"If everyone understood what an incredible series of events have to occur in order for a bloom of this size to happen, no one would miss it," he said.

If you go, desert gold is merely the most abundant flower you will see. Within its tall, yellow ranks hide many smaller plants like the phacelia, whose purple blossoms can produce a skin rash that rivals poison oak.

Hundreds of different wildflowers can be found in Death Valley's vast and varied landscape -- from the depths of Badwater, at 282 feet below sea level the lowest spot in the Western Hemisphere, to the 11,049-foot summit of snow-capped Telescope Peak.

About 60 varieties of flowers are pictured in a pamphlet the National Park Service sells at the visitor center for $2.50.

For the truly dedicated flower hunter, Callagan recommends a spot well outside the park. He said the display going on at California's Amboy Crater, 140 miles southwest of Las Vegas through the heart of Mojave National Preserve, is the best he has ever seen.

"It equals what we saw up here in 2005. It's spectacular, and it's probably peaking right now."

Contact reporter Henry Brean at hbrean@reviewjournal.com or (702) 383-0350.