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Reporting on Earth’s changing climate and the search for solutions

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Climate & environment

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TECOPA, Calif. — Sometimes the desert holds its secrets close, whispering them only to those who carefully listen. But this year, the hottest and driest place in America might as well be shouting.

In California’s Death Valley region, the last few months have been remarkably loud. And the latest bellow is still ringing out, with the area’s native wildflowers bursting into bloom. The flowers have filled a place best known for its shades of browns and grays with brilliant blasts of yellow and purple and sprinkles of pink and cream.

This roaring display comes just weeks after the resurrection of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/03/01/death-valley-lake-california-rain/" target="_blank">a long-dead lake</a>, which filled the park’s Badwater Basin and drew visitors from across the country for a once-in-a-lifetime chance to paddle across a body of water rarely revived since prehistoric days.

These fleeting phenomena can both be traced to the unusual and record-setting precipitation that has inundated the state since August, when Hurricane Hilary gave Death Valley its <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/03/01/death-valley-lake-california-rain/" target=_blank>wettest day ever</a>. Subsequent storms dumped even more rain on the desert, eventually <a href="https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap/StateDroughtMonitor.aspx?CA" target=_blank>dragging it out</a> of a years-long megadrought.

Alice Li

All this water set the stage for one of the best wildflower seasons since 2016, and scientists estimate that tens of thousands of acres are blooming simultaneously. The show has added to the region’s extraordinary year, attracting tourists to the constellation of remote towns along the park’s edge, like Tecopa and Shoshone, where the colors are most vivid. And while the current desert bloom is more subtle than last spring’s <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2023/california-super-bloom-flowers-drought-historic-rainfall/" target=_blank>statewide flower explosion</a>, for those who revere this place and the plants that thrive here, it is no less super.

“The casual visitor, in a time when there aren’t wildflowers, would think, ‘Oh, this is barren, this is desolate, no wonder they call it Death Valley — I don’t see the life,’” said Naomi Fraga, the director of conservation at the California Botanic Garden, the largest botanical garden dedicated to the state’s native plants. “The thing about a super bloom is it forces you to realize the abundance of life that’s actually here. Because all of a sudden you have all these annuals that are everywhere and it’s amazing. It just feels magical, beautiful.”

For people like Fraga, a desert plant specialist, and her frequent collaborator, Patrick Donnelly, who lives in Shoshone and works as the Great Basin director for the Center for Biological Diversity, good wildflower years are restorative. Operating in one of the world’s most extreme places — where the sobering realities of climate change hang in the air like sand on the wind — takes its toll.

Bridget Bennett

So in years when the rain and the temperature align just right, summoning forth a bounty of blossoms, the pair spends days crisscrossing the Mojave in search of wildflowers to soothe the soul.

“With my job, I have a sense of impending doom 24/7,” Donnelly said, steering his truck over rough dirt roads. “So I’m going to enjoy this. Because I need it. … I love flowers in the desert, it’s the thing that makes me happiest in the world, you get addicted to it. So I’ll just take it and try to drink it all up while I can.”

In that way, these plants do for Fraga and Donnelly exactly what they do for their own ecosystem: When they flower, they spread seeds and replenish a natural underground storage network hidden in the soil. The seeds can survive that way for years, even decades, waiting out harsh conditions in the subterranean seed bank until the next big bloom. Scientists are likewise making the most of this time, because they know rougher years await.

While Fraga and Donnelly feel all blooms are worthwhile, the public in recent years has become fixated on one particular type: the super bloom. But it’s a tricky term.

For one, there’s no scientific definition. Its precise origins are unclear, but it appears to be rooted in National Park Service lore. Old-timers stationed in Death Valley were using the term in the ’90s, <a href="https://www.nps.gov/deva/learn/news/wildlowers-2016.htm" target=_blank>according</a> to former park ranger Alan Van Valkenburg, as they swapped stories about the biggest blooms they’d witnessed.

The phrase was hardly seen in media reports before 2016, when Death Valley <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/02/12/majestic-wildflower-display-in-death-valley-heralds-a-potential-super-bloom/" target="_blank">erupted in color</a>, drawing revelers — and reporters — in droves and sending<b> </b>the words to go viral. A newspaper <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/04/travel/escapes/in-death-valley-a-technicolor-season.html" target="_blank">article</a> 10 years earlier described that spring’s desert bloom as perhaps the best of the century, but did not employ the “super” superlative.

Whatever its source, the term has rankled some botanists, who feel it sensationalizes a sacred ecological process. Others have debated what should qualify as a super bloom. The Park Service, for instance, has <a href="https://www.nps.gov/deva/learn/nature/wildflowers.htm" target=_blank>not</a> declared a super bloom on the Death Valley floor this year. But just outside the park’s bounds, wide swaths of flowers were stating their own case and Fraga, for one, has learned to live with the terminology.

“I figure if it helps people see<i> </i>the plants, then you’ve got to just go with it,” she said, walking through a field of brilliant yellow desert golds, sometimes known as desert sunflowers.

This spring, if people look in the right places, they’ll see a riot of color: long stretches of the bright desert golds reflect the harsh midday sun along both sides of Highway 127, an old road that runs north toward the park from Baker, Calif.

Elsewhere — perhaps in the shadow of nearby Tecopa Peak, near the historical China Ranch Date Farm or around the Dumont Dunes — purple shocks of sand verbena, tall stalks of desert lilies and bouquets of Mojave prickly poppies, with their jagged leaves and delicate white flowers, form a tapestry of color that stands in stark contrast to the desolate stereotypes many still hold about places like Death Valley.

What makes this year unique, Fraga said, is the size of the plants and the longevity of their blooms, features she attributes to the unusual mix of summer and winter precipitation. Good wildflower years allow botanists like Fraga to collect samples of rare specimens and gather seeds to be used in future restoration efforts.

But these boom years are also rejuvenating the area’s former mining towns. Susan Sorrells, whose great grandfather founded the town of Shoshone in the early 1900s, said the one-two draw of the reborn Lake Manly and the blooms has helped make up for business lost after torrential rains washed out roads and made visiting the region difficult last year. Lately, the town’s <a href="https://www.shoshonevillage.com/" target=_blank>family-owned inn</a> has been booked solid.

“The visitation has been great because a lot of folks are just realizing what a little piece of paradise this area is and that it needs to be protected,” Sorrells said.

Sorrells, who grew up in Shoshone and now owns the town, has been cultivating an eco-tourism business, designed to introduce visitors to the land she loves and teach them to be conscious of the flora and fauna that thrive here, even when it’s not obvious at first glance.

“We love that everyone is embracing the beauty that we get to enjoy on a daily basis,” she said. “But we’re also mindful that people must be a part of the solution and not love a special area to death.”

An unsettling sense of whiplash is an occupational hazard that comes with working on the front lines of a changing climate — especially when one’s office is a place as extreme as Death Valley.

It wasn’t long ago that Donnelly and Fraga were walking among acres of dead creosote, one of the world’s hardiest plants, during a megadrought that had pulled them both into a state of despondency. And now here they were, in nearly the same place, verdant and vibrant.

“This is climate chaos,” Donnelly said. “A lake forming in Death Valley after the wettest six months on record, followed by this bizarre bloom that is unlike anything we’ve observed before. If you want the picture of climate change, this is it.”

But this being a lush year, Fraga and Donnelly are feeling buoyed — perhaps it’s the memory of kayaking on Lake Manly, the snowcapped Panamint Mountains looming overhead, or maybe it’s the sweet smell of birdcage evening primrose on a recent hike, wafting through the night air to attract nocturnal pollinators.

“The plants always help me put things into perspective — they have so much capacity to withstand these very, very hard times,” Fraga said, standing near a pale green saltbush plant protruding from a small ridge. “I can’t feel despair because the saltbush is here, living its life in the heat, and if the saltbush can keep going, then I can keep going.”

Or, at the very least, she can collect seeds, literally and spiritually, to prepare for the hard times that will inevitably return.

University of California at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism

Miami University, BA in Journalism and Interdisciplinary Studies

Reis Thebault reports on the American West Coast from Los Angeles for The Washington Post. He joined The Post in 2018 and has covered national breaking news, European politics and D.C. city hall. He previously worked on the local desks of the Boston Globe and the Columbus Dispatch.

Reis Thebault

2022 Pulitzer in Public Service Journalism

2022 Webby Award

2021 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award

2020 National Edward R. Murrow Award

2018 Multimedia Journalist of the Year, White House News Photographers Association 'The Eyes of History' 

Alice Li is a senior video journalist for The Washington Post, focusing on climate and environment.  

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Death Valley is alive this year. A super bloom is the latest sign.

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For The Washington Post

Bridget Bennett for The Washington Post

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