The Hundred Year Bloom, Death Valley

Normally, Death Valley is a stark, wild and beautiful landscape of dry rock and shadow. Every thing about it--from Furnace Creek to the Funeral Mountains, Badwater, and its tough luck ghost towns--conjures prolonged misery and destruction. The magnificent and historic wildflower bloom in 2005 produced an array of flowers whose variety and sheer quantity were stunning for such an unmerciful and forbidding place.



Among the blooms we saw were gravel ghost, desert five spot, phacelia, pebble pincushion, scented cryptantha, desert chicory, creosote bush, Death Valley mojavea, desert dandelion, beavertail cactus, purple mat, Panamint live-forever, chia, desert star, and the ubitquitous and sunny desert gold. Where rain had come gushing down from hills and mountains in small rivers and torrents, seeds were watered, and they sprouted in the dirt trails left behind. Most of the flowers were small, even miniscule, and delicate. It was obvious they would wilt and pass with the first real heat of the spring.



Desert gold was everywhere, but clumped in whole meadows in an area called Ashford Mill. There they seemed to grow right out of the red mountain rock, and their green stems fooled the eye into thinking grass actually grew in the desert.

We never got tired of this simple yellow flower.