Wildflower hunting in DV...

For those of you that know about wildflowers in the desert, there are events known as superblooms that can happen. You get the right amount of fall rain, add in the perfect amount of spring rain and just the perfect temperatures and the blooms abound. Well, I’ll break your heart now...this was NOT a superbloom year! However, knowing how tenuous life is in the desert, I was seriously on the hunt for any blooms I could find. I just wanted some proof of life in such a harsh environment. I can’t keep anything green alive, with exception of a single Christmas cactus, so anything blooming & green attracts my adoration. I think Gav was initially bored by my perpetual search for flowers, but even he eventually got on board and spotted a few pops of colour that I had otherwise missed.

My first reward of the hunt came from attempting to find a hike that was recommended by a friend of Gav’s, up Hole In the Wall valley. Instead of the slit canyon that was supposedly at the end, we were treated to 5 miles of rocky, bumpy not fun road with no end in sight. We did however find some really cool blooming wildflowers. The ranger Gav asked later identified these for us as yellow rock nettles. She said she hadn’t seen any yet this season, so at this point I felt like I was winning the hunt! I also appreciated that I hadn’t touched these ones, because apparently they will leave you with a serious sting; they are called a nettle after all.

Next up were the roadside blooms of sunflowers, aka desert gold. At first glance you just assume that they are any old roadside weed, but not in Death Valley. They were only in one part of valley; not too low an elevation, not too high. Just in a few places. I realize that a roadside sunflower is a sunflower by another name, but in the midst of the desert, these were so pretty.

The 3rd day we were in Death Valley it rained, not a enough to flash flood the canyon we were hiking in (thankfully), but clearly enough to get just a few more things blooming. Gavin spotted these purple beauties before I did. Once you saw them, you couldn’t miss them. They were not there the first day we had driven up this road, but a bit of rain and a couple of days and there they were. Nature is just the coolest! Same as the sunflowers, these were only in very specific spot and we didn't see them anywhere else. Apparently these are a notchleaf phacelia.

I don’t know much about blooming cacti, except that I think there aren’t that many of them and they bloom in different ways. My Christmas cactus rewards me with actual flower blooms a couple times a year (Yes, not only do I not kill it, but it blooms. Shocking, I know.). However, not every cactus blooms with a flower. Barrel cacti in bloom just have sort of a reddish glow from a distance. It’s not till you get super close to them that you see the red “blooms” are new spiky bits in a fire-y, brilliant red under lots of spiky bits. So cool!