Death Valley, known as the driest place in North America, is teeming with life with a once-in-a-decade blossoming of wildflowers known as a superbloom, transforming a normally brown desert landscape into carpets of gold, per the AP. Wildflowers bloom across parts of southern California and Nevada at different degrees usually every year. In some years, superblooms are so vibrant they can be seen from space. But it's rare for Death Valley National Park, the hottest place on Earth, to burst with color. "This landscape that sometimes people think of as desolate or devoid of life is coming alive right now with this really beautiful palette of colors," said park ranger Matthew Lamar.
This year's bloom is the best the park has seen since 2016 thanks to steady rainfall and warm temperatures in the last six months, Lamar said. Death Valley received nearly a year's worth of rain since October and experienced the wettest November on record, according to the National Park Service, with 1.76 inches of rain, allowing long-dormant seeds buried in the soil to burst through the surface. Known as the "desert sunflower," the desert gold flower blankets areas of the valley, with purple phacelia, brown-eyed primrose and the pink desert five-spot sprinkled throughout.
Just north of the Furnace Creek Visitor Center, Las Vegas resident Jackie Gilbert appreciated the contrast between the field of gold flowers with the mountains behind it and the blue sky above. She said the flowers' resilience is amazing. "It's a good reminder that even in the face of all this adversity, that they can still thrive," said Gilbert, who visited specifically to see the superbloom. Time is of the essence to see these ephemeral, or short-lived, wildflowers. The fields of flowers on the park's lower elevations are expected to remain until mid-to-late March, depending on the weather. Higher elevations will blossom with color April through June, according to the National Park Service.
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