Our spring was cut short however, and our travels took us back to Ohio, and then down to Mississippi. I feared I would never know what treasures were scattered around the land of movie stars and Redwood trees. But when the opportunity to return to California came up, we grabbed it and squeezed. And where this past year's wildflowers are concerned, it couldn't have been better timing.
We spent the last three months of 2002 watching the southern Sierra Nevadas sink in winter, being told again and again, "You just wait till next year, young fella. You'll see you some real wildflowers." Yeah. Sure.
The area was a sagebrushy, dusty, dry and utterly inhospitable-seeming place. Wildflowers? Here? I simply didn't believe the old codgers. Well pickle me in pork's feet and spank my bottom; the southern Sierra Nevadas, the deserts, Red Rock Canyon, Yosemite - every place we went for wildflowers in 2003 was a paradise of one sort or another. And each week seemed to be more incredibly glorious than the previous.
I've been treated to a variety of wildflower adventures in a variety of places, but this ... well, words fail me. I will, of course, give it a go. After all, that's why I'm here.
My wife and I moved on to Long Beach, in southern California, at the end of the year, leaving the dusty lunar landscape of the southern Sierra Nevadas behind. And while we went about our business there, and discovered such new wildflowers as Bush Sunflower and Giant Coreopsis and Sea Dahlias, winter was dropping just the right amount of moisture on places that would respond with explosions of rainbows. We had no idea the carnival of colors, and all the new species of wildflowers we would cross paths with over the next several months. As I said about our being back in California, " ... it couldn't have been better timing."
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