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Sunset over the National Monument of the Carrizo Plain north of Los Angeles. The superflowering wildflowers fade into brown.
Kirk Siegler / NPR
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Kirk Siegler / NPR
Sunset over the National Monument of the Carrizo Plain north of Los Angeles. The superflowering wildflowers fade into brown.
Kirk Siegler / NPR
Two and a half hours from LA, it's like another world bouncing off an old jeep road in the Temblor mountain range.
"The rainbow that these hills had represented for a month is almost gone," says my friend Michael Lee Jackson, a professional photographer and amateur explorer, as we drove.
This is his seventh visit to the National Monument of the Carrizo Plain since mid-March. This was the beginning of the "super bloom" that transformed the deserts and meadows of southern California into beautiful mosaics of yellows, oranges, reds, purples and blues.
Jackson likes to document the changes. "Apart from the shapes of the hills," he says, "it does not look like the same place at all, but between painting jobs."
Nowadays, frenzied crowds carrying selfie sticks trying to capture this momentum of beauty for their Instagram feeds have become clearer. But there are still whites and purples – lupins, daisies on the hillside. And on the floor of the massive plain itself a huge carpet of yellow, hundreds of acres in size.
A field of yellow flowers in the Temblor range, at the National Monument of the plain of Carrizo.
Kirk Siegler / NPR
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Kirk Siegler / NPR
We are happy to have this place especially to explore.
The protected monument, designated by President Clinton in 2001, is huge – some 40 km long and 15 km wide – impressive even. Standing on the floor of the plain, taking all this, it's like being in an inland sea. To the left of the lush mountains, closer to the Pacific Ocean, to the right, almost burnt desert hills, cut by the San Andreas Fault to their base.
There are few amenities such as signs or marked trails.
What remains of an abandoned ranch on the national monument of the plain of Carrizo, where summers bring hot temperatures and little or no rain.
Kirk Siegler / NPR
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Kirk Siegler / NPR
What remains of an abandoned ranch on the national monument of the plain of Carrizo, where summers bring hot temperatures and little or no rain.
Kirk Siegler / NPR
As the "blooming" begins to fade, Jackson turns his focus on rotting old ranch houses with their roofs collapsed. There are vans and plows of the era of depression that have just been abandoned in the fields; relics of homesteaders who have tried to make a living in an extremely hot and dry environment.
"Life in these places has always been very hard, the elements are so extreme," he says. "People have this idyllic picture of the situation in a" little house in the meadow. "The answer is brutal."
Even at the beginning of the year, the sun in the afternoon already seems brutal. In a few weeks, the mercury will be in the hundreds. All those flowers that came out of winter rainier than normal winter will fade and become a fuel for the summer forest fires.
At one of the few marked trailheads, Wallace Creek, we apply sunscreen again. Hikers fill their bottles with water. A family in a van looks unprepared. We advise them to take more water than they think they need and pay attention to rattlesnakes. They are out now. We had already seen two.
Photographer Michael Lee Jackson jumps out of his Toyota to take a closer look at a rattlesnake lounging on the dirt road.
Kirk Siegler / NPR
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Kirk Siegler / NPR
Photographer Michael Lee Jackson jumps out of his Toyota to take a closer look at a rattlesnake lounging on the dirt road.
Kirk Siegler / NPR
Asked where the best place is to see the super bloom, the veteran visitor Jackson can not say. There is really no good answer.
"People want a quick fix to find the best things," Jackson said later. "But a place like this is different every day."
Jackson has been trekking here for almost a decade. After another long climb, we finally reached one of his favorite photography locations, a makeshift camping and retreat perched on the edge of a steep canyon atop the Temblor Range.
There are still some persistent yellow fields in front of us and below us.
"I was here before flowering, here after," he says, the shutter release tight. "And I can tell a bigger story about this place now."
What is this story?
He speaks of the impermanence of nature, he replies, of the ever-evolving art works of nature. It's a story that most people will never see, once the super bloom fades into brown.
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