Wildflowers are blooming in the driest place in North America — but not for long

DEATH VALLEY, Calif. (AP) — Death Valley, known as the driest place in North America, is teeming with life with a once-in-a-decade blossoming of wildflowers known as a superbloom, transforming a normally brown desert landscape into carpets of gold.

Wildflowers bloom across parts of southern California and Nevada at different degrees usually every year. In some years, superblooms are so vibrant they can be seen from space. But it’s rare for Death Valley National Park, the hottest place on Earth, to burst with color.

“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,” said park ranger Matthew Lamar.

This year’s bloom is the best the park has seen since 2016 thanks to steady rainfall and warm temperatures in the last six months, Lamar said.

Death Valley received nearly a year’s worth of rain since October and experienced the wettest November on record, according to the National Park Service, with 1.76 inches of rain, allowing long-dormant seeds buried in the soil to burst through the surface.

Thriving in adversity

Known as the “desert sunflower,” the desert gold flower blankets areas of the valley, with purple phacelia, brown-eyed primrose and the pink desert five-spot sprinkled throughout.

Just north of the Furnace Creek Visitor Center, Las Vegas resident Jackie Gilbert appreciated the contrast between the field of gold flowers with the mountains behind it and the blue sky above. She said the flowers’ resilience is amazing.

“It’s a good reminder that even in the face of all this adversity, that they can still thrive,” said Gilbert, who visited specifically to see the superbloom.

Ecologists say the superbloom disproves a misconception about deserts: that there’s no life. Even in years without vibrant blooms, a lot of life happens in Death Valley, said Loralee Larios, plant ecologist at the University of California, Riverside.

“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,” Larios said.

Tiffany Pereira, ecologist and associate research scientist at the Desert Research Institute, said desert plants have adapted to go decades without water, waiting for the perfect conditions for its seeds to germinate and spring to life.

Short-lived opportunity

Time is of the essence to see these ephemeral, or short-lived, wildflowers.

The fields of flowers on the park’s lower elevations are expected to remain until mid-to-late March, depending on the weather. Higher elevations will blossom with color April through June, according to the National Park Service.

Visitors can check a poster outside of the visitor center for the best spots to view the flowers. In early March, fields of wildflowers are blooming just north of the visitor center, as well as south along Badwater Road. Ashford Mill, an hour’s drive from the visitor center, is also bursting with color, according to Lamar.

Ecologists and the park rangers caution visitors to stick to designated trails and avoid trampling on the flowers. Picking the flowers is prohibited, and touching the purple phacelia could cause skin irritation. Any flower plucked from the ground means fewer seeds planted for future generations to enjoy, Pereira said.

Visitors should also watch their step for the sphinx moth caterpillars, which are scattered across the desert floor in search of the brown-eyed primrose to eat before it buries itself into the soil and transforms into a moth.

“I think it’s a great time to come to Death Valley and have that unique experience because who knows when the next one will happen?” Lamar said.