Death Valley sees its most spectacular superbloom in a decade
Abby Wines, acting deputy superintendent of Death Valley National Park, said that on average, Death Valley typically only gets about 2 inches of rain each year.
“From November to early January, we had about two and a half inches of rain, so we had more than our annual average in just two and a half months,” she said.
Wines said some wildflowers typically emerge in the park each spring, but superblooms (although it’s not an official botanical term) only occur after particularly wet fall and winter seasons.
The most widespread flowers – those that can be seen at lower elevations almost everywhere in the park – also need the “right” kind of rain, according to Blacker.
“We need several days of drizzle, fog and gentle rain that penetrates, but not the heavy monsoon rains that wash out our highways and destroy our roads,” he said. “And then we need mild temperatures in spring, because once the flowers appear, their big enemy is wind and heat.”
The types of wildflowers that bloom in the desert are called ephemerals. Unlike cacti, which store water to survive in hot, arid environments, these flowers can exist for long periods as seeds in the soil.
“You can think of this as an escape from drought,” said Erik Rakestraw, curator of botany at the Arizona-Sonoran Desert Museum in Tucson. “In seed form, it’s like they don’t even exist. They just settle into the ground.”
Under the right conditions, the seeds will germinate. Then, once the flowers are pollinated, they will become seeds again and the cycle will begin again.
“If there’s no good rain next year, or even the year after that, or several years in a row, these seeds have evolved to just wait and wait,” Rakestraw said.
For anyone hoping to catch this year’s stunning bloom, time is running out.
Wines said wildflowers at lower elevations should only persist until mid-to-late March. At higher elevations, flowers should appear between April and June. But both of those timeline estimates depend heavily on the weather, she added.
