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2003: A Season of California Wildflowers - the Western Mojave Desert

© Gregg Pasterick

My wife and I started the year in Long Beach, where we discovered such new wildflowers as Bush Sunflower and Giant Coreopsis and Sea Dahlias. Meanwhile, 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, or new species of wildflowers that lurked in our future. As it turned out, 2003 was one bodacious year for wildflowers in California, and we were knee deep in it and sinking fast.

Mid- and late-winter drives down to the San Diego area, up into the Santa Monica Mts., up around Ojai and beyond to Pismo Beach, and back down through Carizzo Plain were like epic Indiana Jones adventures, had he been a wildflower enthusiast. There were more and new species of lupine and phacelia (one species, covering acres and acres of Carizzo Plain, smelled of bubblegum,) there was golden-orange Fiddleneck, species of Paintbrush here and there, varieties of Evening Primrose, a hillside covered with Padre's Shooting Star, miles and miles of Goldfields, a burn area sprouting Indian Warrior like scarlet whiskers, California Poppies, and an actual rainbow, not a metaphoric one. (Hmmm ... did Noah take wildflowers, two by two, on board the ark?) It was all just so breathtaking, and my wife and I just kept pinching ourselves. This was too good to be true.

And it was only just beginning.

We next turned our attention to the western Mojave Desert region, which meant Red Rock Canyon and Short Canyon. And the southern Sierra Nevadas beyond, Kernville to be exact, where we had spent the end of 2002, being reminded by lifelong locals, "You just wait till next year, young fella. You'll see you some real wildflowers." I was skeptical of the desert and Kernville, and after the above paragraph, I expected to be disappointed.

I wasn't.

Incredibly, a variety of colorful flowers grew from the sandy soil of Red Rock Canyon in bunches any florist would envy. There were verbenas and Sweet Lupine, which smelled of roses. There were primroses and Desert Dandelions and coreopsis-looking things and monkeyflowers and gilia species and Desert Hollyhock and blooming Joshua Trees ... pant, pant, pant. And they were all flourishing in this harsh unfriendly environment, all because of just the right amount of winter moisture.

I wished I had a dog named Toto so I could have looked down at it and said, "I don't think we're in Kansas anymore."

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