March 02, 2016 National Geographic:
One of the hottest and driest places on Earth is now, for a short while, covered in beautiful yellow, pink and purple wildflowers. Death Valley has wildflower blooms every year, but an unusual series of storms in October has triggered what some call a “super bloom”. This is the biggest bloom Death Valley has seen in a decade. The flowers that bloom lie dormant as seeds in the valley for most of the year. Varieties now blooming include the Desert Gold, the Golden Evening Primrose and the more elusive Desert Five-spot. Previous super blooms were in 1998 and 2005. Those years, like 2015 and 2016, also saw heavy El Niño activity.
I was there for the 2005 superbloom. At that time I had only a little 4 Mpixel point-and-shoot Canon elph digital camera, but managed to take the panorama below by stitching several shots.
This year (2016) promised to be at least as good and, given that it would be the first superbloom for eleven years, Anne and I made two weekend trips to Death Valley. On the first (6,7 Feb) we had the flowers to ourselves, as there had been little publicity and the Badwater road was closed at both ends, so the only access to the best flowers was via the dirt Harry Wade exit road. Our second trip (Feb. 227-28) was very different. Visitation at the Park was greater than anyone remembered; crowds of people everywhere; the gas station at Stovepipe Wells had sold out of gas; and we had to drive miles down dirt trails to fins a wilderness campsite. But the flowers were even more spectacular.
My photos below are compliled as a sequence of landscape images from dawn to dusk; followed by macro shots of individual flowers.
