Black mustard and California poppies cover the Lake Elsinore hills with color. Photo copyright 2019 by Anna Boudinot.
April showers bring May flowers. Unless you live in Southern California, in which case February showers bring March flowers. Twenty nineteen marks the first year since 2011 that California has not been in drought, and kind of like a reward for cutting down on shower time and replacing our front lawns with drought-resistant landscaping, we get butterflies and wildflowers.
Wildflowers proliferate all over the region, but are particularly spectacular in a couple specific places, so I hopped in the car with a friend to make a day trip to Riverside and San Diego Counties. We were in search of the “superbloom,” a term that’s come to describe what it looks like when there are no flowers for years and suddenly there are flowers everywhere.
Lake Elsinore
Our first stop was Lake Elsinore. About a one-hour drive from downtown Los Angeles, it’s a former mining town with a freshwater lake that used to attract vacationing celebrities from LA. It now attracts social media influencers flocking to its stunning fields of California poppies. Even if we hadn’t mapped out our destination beforehand, there would have been no way to miss the poppies in Lake Elsinore. From the freeway, there were broad orange swaths covering the rolling green hills. The poppy is California’s state flower, described quite beautifully by the Flower Essence Society:
Poppies and blue sage complement each other perfectly in a superbloom. Photo copyright 2019 by Anna Boudinot.
“The California Poppy is truly a plant of the sun, opening and closing in response to the radiance of the light and flourishing in open, sunny meadows. [It has] feather-like airy foliage [and] fiery colors that penetrate even into the leaves.”
We sat in a traffic jam at the Walker Canyon exit for thirty minutes before finally finding a parking spot by the side of the road. It was a Wednesday morning and the place was a mob scene. I had read horror stories in Los Angeles Magazine and from the Instagram account Joshua Tree Hates You of careless morons destroying the natural habitat just to make themselves look cool. Thankfully, we didn’t see much of this at Walker Canyon, though there were plenty of women staggering along the dirt paths in flowy dresses and high heels as they desperately hoped for flawless insta pics.
We didn’t have to stray far from the car to get all the photos we wanted. Blankets of poppies were punctuated by the yellow blooms of black mustard—pretty, but invasive—and the occasional purple patches of California blue sage and California bluebells.
Update: on Sunday, March 17, 2019, the city of Lake Elsinore shut down access to the poppy fields due to horrendous traffic and visitors’ terrible behavior. They reopened on March 18. Before you visit, check the news coverage here, and consider visiting on a weekday rather than a weekend.
Desert chicory and friends at Anza-Borrego. Photo copyright 2019 by Anna Boudinot
Anza-Borrego Desert State Park
Our next stop was Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, the largest state park in California. It’s about an hour and a half away from Lake Elsinore (making it about two and a half hours from downtown LA). Part of the Colorado Desert, it resembles the southern half of Joshua Tree National Park quite a bit, including rolling hills and unique rock formations. The winding roads themselves were quite an experience; the landscape seemed unreal and at every twist and turn we weren’t sure what we would find next.
We stopped at the visitor center on the western edge of the park to have a picnic lunch and admire the wildflowers. The park rangers were well-prepared for the superbloom crowds. The Anza-Borrego website is updated regularly with wildflower information, and they were handing out maps of the best spots in the park to see the flowers. Most of the areas listed were only accessible to four-wheel-drive vehicles, and my little car didn’t qualify. Nevertheless, we enjoyed our time near the visitor center, where we discovered white, blue, purple, red, and yellow blossoms as far as the eye could see. We spotted wild heliotrope, desert dandelion, chuparosa, desert chicory, and even a barrel cactus in bloom.
Though the nature of the day trip meant we spent more time in the car than we did outside, the visions of the splendid blooms will remain in our minds (and our Instagram feeds) forever.
Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. Photo copyright 2019 by Anna Boudinot
Before making the journey, read up on superbloom etiquette here to make sure you’re not being a “nature doofus.” Can’t get away to see the wildflowers? Modern Hiker has a lovely post about finding flowers in Los Angeles’ proverbial backyard.