Burst of blooming plants in Death Valley attributed to record precipitation
TECOPA, Calif. — Sometimes the desert holds its secrets close, whispering them only to those who carefully listen. But this year, the hottest and driest place in America might as well be shouting.
In California’s Death Valley region, the last few months have been remarkably loud. And the latest bellow is still ringing out, with the area’s native wildflowers bursting into bloom. The flowers have filled a place best known for its shades of browns and grays with brilliant blasts of yellow and purple and sprinkles of pink and cream.
This roaring display comes just weeks after the resurrection of a long-dead lake, which filled the park’s Badwater Basin and drew visitors from across the country for a once-in-a-lifetime chance to paddle across a body of water rarely revived since prehistoric days.
These fleeting phenomena can both be traced to the unusual and record-setting precipitation that has inundated the state since August, when Hurricane Hilary gave Death Valley its wettest day ever.
Subsequent storms dumped even more rain on the desert, eventually dragging it out of a years-long megadrought.
All this water set the stage for one of the best wildflower seasons since 2016, and scientists estimate that tens of thousands of acres are blooming simultaneously. The show has added to the region’s extraordinary year, attracting tourists to the constellation of remote towns along the park’s edge, like Tecopa and Shoshone, where the colors are most vivid. And while the current desert bloom is more subtle than last spring’s statewide flower explosion, for those who revere this place and the plants that thrive here, it is no less super.
“The casual visitor, in a time when there aren’t wildflowers, would think, ‘Oh, this is barren, this is desolate, no wonder they call it Death Valley — I don’t see the life,’” said Naomi Fraga, the director of conservation at the California Botanic Garden, the largest botanical garden dedicated to the state’s native plants. “The thing about a super bloom is it forces you to realize the abundance of life that’s actually here. Because all of a sudden you have all these annuals that are everywhere and it’s amazing. It just feels magical, beautiful.”
For people like Fraga, a desert plant specialist, and her frequent collaborator, Patrick Donnelly, who lives in Shoshone and works as the Great Basin director for the Center for Biological Diversity, good wildflower years are restorative. Operating in one of the world’s most extreme places takes its toll.
So in years when the rain and the temperature align just right, summoning forth a bounty of blossoms, the pair spend days crisscrossing the Mojave in search of wildflowers.
“With my job, I have a sense of impending doom 24/7,” Donnelly said, steering his truck over rough dirt roads. “So I’m going to enjoy this. Because I need it. . . . I love flowers in the desert, it’s the thing that makes me happiest in the world, you get addicted to it. So I’ll just take it and try to drink it all up while I can.”
In that way, these plants do for Fraga and Donnelly exactly what they do for their own ecosystem: When they flower, they spread seeds and replenish a natural underground storage network hidden in the soil. The seeds can survive that way for years, even decades, waiting out harsh conditions in the subterranean seed bank until the next big bloom. Scientists are likewise making the most of this time, because they know rougher years await.
While Fraga and Donnelly feel all blooms are worthwhile, the public in recent years has become fixated on one particular type: the super bloom. But it’s a tricky term.
For one, there’s no scientific definition. Its precise origins are unclear, but it appears to be rooted in National Park Service lore. Old-timers stationed in Death Valley were using the term in the ’90s, according to former park ranger Alan Van Valkenburg, as they swapped stories about the biggest blooms they’d witnessed.
The phrase was hardly seen in media reports before 2016, when Death Valley erupted in color, drawing revelers — and reporters — in droves and sending the words to go viral. A newspaper article 10 years earlier described that spring’s desert bloom as perhaps the best of the century, but did not employ the “super” superlative.
What makes this year unique, Fraga said, is the size of the plants and the longevity of their blooms, features she attributes to the unusual mix of summer and winter precipitation.