I had visited some of the Southern California desert parks previously, but this seemed like it might be a good time to take a stab at the wildflower season. I was not disappointed.

The Antelope Valley Poppy Preserve is just outside Lancaster, and I had been there previously, but I had hoped for more. The preserve specializes in the California Poppy, Eschscholzia californica, but this winter had been dry, and the poppies were not cooperating much. On the day I was there in late March, the poppies were almost zero within the preserve. Fortunately, right across the road there were millions of them.

Next stop on the list was Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, the largest state park in California. The sandy soil there seems to be good for sand verbena, dune evening primrose, and caterpillars! It appeared to me that these dune evening primrose plants looked rather mature, with many blooms on each plant. In contrast, when I got to the Eureka Dunes in DVNP a few days later, the dune evening primrose is a different subspecies, and the plants there were small, with only one or two night flowers per plant. Here at Anza-Borrego, the Sphinx moth caterpillars (Hyles lineata) were starting to eat everything in sight. I must have hit there right at the flower peak, since reports from one week later were sad. One evening, as I wandered around the sand, there were too many beautiful flowers to even try to photograph, so I had to just sit there and watch the sun go down.

I headed out past the Coachella Valley to Joshua Tree NP and entered through the Cottonwood Spring Entrance. The carpets of small desert flowers were interspersed with the taller ocotillos and the occasional cactus. The desert dandelions (Malacothrix globrata) were especially plentiful. Joshua Trees were blooming in some areas of the park.

Continuing toward Death Valley NP, I came upon the wildflower bloom early one morning near Salsbury Pass. If I situated myself at just the right angle, it looked like one continuous carpet of golden yellow. However, the weather was warming up, and I knew that the flowers would not last long. The winter season had not been very wet, so the flowers would bloom and then wilt away quickly.

The Badwater Road runs through Jubilee Pass and northward past Badwater to Furnace Creek. Since Badwater is the lowest spot in the Western Hemisphere, it is the spot where all tourists stop. The National Park Service had just finished rebuilding the parking lot and sidewalk system there within the last year, so the saltwater pool is more protected. Salt crystals are abundant. Right across the salt flats is the snowy Panamint Range with Telescope Peak shining in the bright sunlight. I could see our route from the 2001 trip there, and it almost makes me shudder to think about it.

Rather than visitor centers and campgrounds, I was seeking some quality time in the more remote areas of the park. First, I drove to the Racetrack Valley. The road is paved as far as Ubehebe Crater, and then it becomes four-wheel-drive. I believe that my sedan was the only two-wheel-drive car on the Racetrack Road that afternoon as I drove over Tin Pass. The usual complement of Joshua Trees (Yucca brevifolia), cacti, and the desert Indian paintbrush (Castilleja augustifolia) were there on duty.

The Racetrack Valley had several visitors during the day, but then the population thinned out to almost zero before nightfall. The dry lake bed is perfectly flat and gets a slippery mud surface after a winter rain, so large rocks that appear on it can slide along when pushed by a strong wind. The rocks leave sliding tracks. When at the Racetrack, I enjoy nosing around the old copper and lead mines. I try to figure out how the 1890's prospector managed to find these ore deposits in the first place with not much more than a burro and a pick axe for aid.

Next on the agenda was the Eureka Valley. The sand dunes there are the highest sand dunes in California, but few folks ever go there to see them. The so-called Death Valley-Big Pine Road is not good, and its washboard gravel surface presents a natural barrier to the average tourist. The people at the Furnace Creek Visitor Center could not recommend it at all. If I had just wanted sand dunes, I could have gone to Pismo Beach, but the Eureka Dunes are special. This valley is the home of some endemic plants, the Eureka Dunes Evening Primrose (Oenothera californica ssp. eurekensis), the Eureka Dunes Dune Grass (Swallenia alexandrae), and the Shining Milkvetch (Astragalus lentiginosus var. Barneby). Since I had seen the normal California Evening Primrose (Oenothera californica ssp. avita) at Anza-Borrego, I wanted to see what was different about this subspecies. It seems that this one never grows in the exact same spot from year to year, and the same cannot be said about the normal one. This Eureka Dunes primrose folds its flower during the heat of the day, and it unfolds it at night for pollination opportunites by nocturnal moths. So, how was I going to get a photo? I walked around the sand dunes one afternoon, and I noticed what appeared to be a strange plant growing in only a few places. I marked the position with my GPS receiver, and then returned to the same position before dawn when the flower was open. I'll have to write a book someday: Stalking the Wily Eureka Dunes Evening Primrose.

The Eureka Dunes, 650-700 feet tall.

without flower open

    with flower open

dune vetch

After sidestepping a snake on the dunes, I decided that it was time to move on to the next adventure. I drove on out to Big Pine and then southward toward Lone Pine. As I would have expected, Mount Whitney was still there, beaming in the bright sunlight and overlooking the Alabama Hills.

I re-entered Death Valley National Park, this time from the west. The next adventure was Marble Canyon. In the vicinity of Stovepipe Wells, I drove over to the mouth of Cottonwood Canyon on a gravel road, but I was forced to park my car at Cottonwood Wash and walk the rest of the way. When partway up into Cottonwood Canyon, I made a right turn and headed up into Marble Canyon. There is a first narrows, then a second narrows, and then a third narrows. Along the way, a side canyon had its own narrows. Basically, the rock formations are amazing, and the rock nodules embedded in the sidewalls of the canyon were even more amazing, which led to the name of the place. That was enough, but then I found the petroglyphs, and that made my whole day. I'm not sure how many thousands of years ago it was that some early native chipped these symbols into the smooth rock face, but the afternoon sun in the southern sky reflected off the smooth northern wall of the canyon, and that hit the southern wall of the canyon where these were found. In all, there must have been eight or ten symbols, but your guess is as good as mine as to their exact meaning. I must have covered sixteen miles that day on foot.

Eventually I met up with a group from San Jose State University. This was to be a science field study program with two professors. For a place to stay, we had made special arrangements with U.S. Borax to stay at the old Ryan Mine village, which is private property just barely outside of the national park. Basically, borax (an ore of the element boron) was mined in the 19th century down around the desert floor of Death Valley, but it was not so profitable due to the huge distance that the ore had to be hauled out to any big city. Around 1913, rich borax was found up higher, around 3000 feet elevation, and the mining camp known as Ryan began to spring up into an entire village with mine buildings, dormitories, a church, a hospital, and a school. However, in the mid-1920's, U.S. Borax found another richer ore deposit closer to Los Angeles, so they moved everybody off to that new mine, Boron, to mine the good stuff. They decided to put the Ryan mine into mothballs for later use. Ryan was used for a tourist hotel, and then it was used as a movie location during the 1950's. It was kind of strange for us to be sitting in a Ryan building, the old hotel, and watching an old movie reel of Death Valley Days from 1953 which featured the very hotel that we were sitting in. Anyway, old Ryan is still sitting there, waiting for the second act. If the big open pit mine at Boron runs out some day, then U.S. Borax will probably move everybody back to Ryan and start all over again.

For the readers who may be chemists, some of the ores are hydrated sodium borates, some are hydrated calcium borates, and some are hydrated sodium-calcium borates. There is less refinement necessary if they start without the calcium in the molecule.

The old 19th century borax miners would test their sample by pouring sulfuric acid over it, and then alcohol, and then they would light it. If it burned green, then they had borax. The 20-mule-team wagons hauled out their cargo, and a longstanding symbol was created.

It was a pleasant five days. We chased lizards, photographed the endangered pupfish near the Devil's Hole, studied the desert-adapted plants, and tried to learn a few things about the desert corners of the land we live in. We visited historical sites like Leadfield in Titus Canyon, and saw some rather rare plants growing along the way.

   
pupfish                                                                        hummingbird                                                                                one mean ground squirrel

Death Valley monkeyflower (Mimulus rupicola)               the bank of ghost town Rhyolite                         the endemic Panamint Daisy

Finally, on my way home, I stopped off in the Wildrose Canyon of the Panamint Range and found the spot with Panamint Daisies. The flower heads are about the size of your hand. That kind of finished off the trip on a good note.

There's always next year.