Superbloom, Schmooperbloom: Joshua Tree's Regularbloom Has Everything You Need

You've been there. You've done that. Other people might have read the New York Times and hastened out to Death Valley to see the Superbloom, but you wanted something other than long lines of cars crowding the available pullouts. Maybe the thought of tourists from Akron (or Atwater Village) trampling the first hundred feet of flowers flanking the roadside left you cold.

Or maybe you were around for the pre-Instagram blooms of 2005 and 1998, so you've seen those compelling broad vistas of desert gold daisies without the overlay of social media hype, and you'd like something different this time around.

Fortunately, for the next week or two, you've got just such an opportunity in the less-traveled parts of Joshua Tree National Park. And the good news is you won't be able to see the best stuff from your car, so you'll have to walk around on foot — which is the only way to really see the desert.

After all, as magnificent as Death Valley is, it's a little hard to get out of sight of the other visitors along the road between Shoshone and Furnace Creek unless you really have a long hike in mind. But on a recent visit to the Cottonwood area of Joshua Tree National Park, during a gorgeous, perfect-temperatured weekend, I saw far fewer tourists than I did blossoms — and given that part of JTNP's varied topography, it was easy to escape my fellow visitors and focus on the foliage.

Joshua Tree didn't get the torrential rains that Death Valley did this winter. That's a mixed blessing, as Death Valley National Park is still repairing millions of dollars in damage to roads and other infrastructure done by the storms that created the Superbloom.

Joshua Tree, instead, got a moderately wet few months of winter, and the bloom in the park — while better than we've seen the last couple of years — is well within the fat and squishy part of the bell curve as the last couple decades go. Call it a Regularbloom: it's how the desert is supposed to look.

That doesn't mean the bloom isn't impressive. For instance, it's one of the best years I can remember for bloom of Joshua Tree's other yucca, the Mojave yucca a.k.a Yucca schidigera.

Joshua trees are blooming throughout the park's upper elevations as well, though not in as great profusion as that bloom that attracted a lot of attention a few years back. But the Mojave yuccas are having a field day: few clumps don't have at least two spires of fat, waxy flowers.

Mojave yucca is one of the most common plants in the park, and you're pretty much guaranteed a show no matter where you look. And many of the park's characteristic Mojave Desert flowers, which inhabit the higher-elevation western section of the Park, are showing nicely now. Globe mallow is a good example:

But the real action seems to be along Joshua Tree's southern border, where the vegetation is solidly characteristic of the Sonoran Desert rather than the Mojave.

If you head to the Park's Cottonwood area by way of the entrances in Joshua Tree and Twentynine Palms, your first indication of something special happening in the Park's Sonoran Desert section comes well into your drive through Pinto Basin Road. The ubiquitous creosote bushes, now blooming their usual sparse yellow, become more thickly covered with bloom. Same goes for the desert senna, which hasn't really gotten started yet: they'll be awash in yellow blossoms mid-April, probably, looking for all the world like cottage garden wallflowers. 

But keep an eye out as you start crossing the braided washes in the southern Pinto Basin. Find a safe place to pull over, grab a big jug of water and put on your hat, and take a walk. In the sandy washes, you'll find the ghostlike flowers of Mentzelia, or sand blazing star:

Keep walking. Once you're out of sight of the roadway, and the possibility lowers of being rescued against your will by a well-meaning traveler, you can do things that might seem odd to the uninitiated, like lying flat on your stomach in the gravel to get a better view of the so-called "belly-flowers." (Don't lie on a cactus.) This is a great opportunity to become more familiar with the procession of bloom and fade in the desert, each flower opening up, blossoming, and then withering in its turn. Different species in different places will open up on different days, and the study of that natural schedule — called phenology — offers hints over the years to climate and how it's changing. In the Pinto Basin, the charming little purple bellyflowers called "purple mat," a.k.a. Nama demissum, were just starting to fade a little when I took these photos on March 19;

While the flat-growing spurge locally called "rattlesnake weed" shows little sign of slowing down in its bloom anytime soon. This is a true bellyflower, with blossoms less than a quarter inch across, and the height of the mature plant only about twice that. 

We're also almost done with the season for brown-eyed primrose, one of the more common wildflowers in Joshua Tree NP, but their flowers, though slightly weather-beaten, are still fascinating.

Keep walking, though some parts of the southern Pinto Basin may seem prematurely sunblasted and devoid of colors other than tan and brown. Turn the right corner in the wash and you may see something a ways off that blinds you with its vivid bloom:

It's a beavertail cactus, one of the California desert's most common and most colorful pricky pears, and the Park is loaded with enough beavertail flower buds that you're guaranteed a good show through April, and probably beyond. Their flowers are a nearly psychoactive pink that's almost impossible to photograph precisely: if you adjust the color in your photo to match the actual bloom, it looks too vivid. No one will believe it.

The purple-flowered Phacelia is another bloom, still prevalent in the Pinto Basin, whose color resists photography. Imagine a deeper, more delicate shade of dark lavender here:

Resist the temptation, when photographing Phacelia, to hold the plant with your fingers to steady it against the wind. A significant percentage of people suffer a poison-oak-like reaction to touching the plant, complete with blistering. (For that matter, don't touch the beavertail cacti either.)

When you reach the Cottonwood Visitor Center, make sure your water bottles are full, and if you happen to have come in from the south entrance — a clever way to avoid the long lines in Joshua Tree and 29 — be sure to pay your entry fee there. Then head a little ways south toward the Interstate. Pretty soon you'll start seeing Joshua Tree's answer to those endless fields of desert gold in Death Valley: Encelia farinosa, a.k.a. brittlebush, the glory of the Low Desert.

To be fair, brittlebush is blooming right now all over the Sonoran Desert, in less-sublime places like Cathedral City vacant lots and beneath the wind turbines in Desert Hot Springs, but in JTNP you'll see it as Gaia intended, mixed with wild plants such as ocotillo and California poppies. 

Speaking of California poppies, there are at least two species blooming in southern Joshua Tree National Park right now. Both are markedly different from the coastal species, Eschscholzia californica, which has robust blossoms of opalescent orange. (That's also the species seen right now at the Poppy Reserve in Antelope Valley.)

In this part of the desert, the poppies you're more likely to see are smaller in stature, and they tend more toward yellow blossoms than orange — though you can find some that blaze as orange as their coastal counterparts. There's Eschscholzia parishii, which grows about a foot tall max and has rounded flowers about half the diameter of the more familiar coastal poppy:

And then there's my personal favorite, the little gold poppy, charmingly called Eschscholzia minutiflora, also about a foot tall but with petals a quarter inch long or less:

You might need to spend a while looking for poppies, though, because the sheer yellow overwhelm of the stout-flowered brittlebush takes a while to stop burning itself into your retinas.

Here's another way to know for sure you're in the Sonoran Desert: you start seeing four-foot-tall shrubs with gray, drabbish leaves covered with clusters of deep red tubular flowers. This is chuparosa, a.k.a. Beloperone californica, found only in the Low Desert. The common name, which means something like "red sucker" in Spanish, stems from the flower's attractiveness to hummingbirds, but you'll also see orioles and warblers drinking the flowers' nectar, and the seeds are a staple food of Gambel's quail.

You'll also see yellow cups here, another Camissonia not all that distantly relatied to the brown-eyed primrose mentioned above, but there are just getting started in their bloom on 16-inch stems.

The road south of Cottonwood Visitor Center winds through a canyon with a wash. The road's occasional pullouts offer places to get out and clamber around in search of bloom. (Consult rangers at the Visitor Center for advice on safety as regards water, clothing, and snake avoidance. Until you do that, don't stick your hands under anything, and wear closed-toe shoes.)

But south of that canyon, as the road opens up into the Bajada area of the Park, you find one of the most ecologically interesting aspects of this year's fantastic Regularbloom. The southern fringe of the Park is a wide alluvial plain — a bajada —whose deep-south-facing soils offer superb habitat for some important desert plants. Ironwoods and palo verdes dot the plain, their leguminous leaves supplying what little fertilizer soils in this part of the desert ever get.

And then there are the ocotillos, the odd, spiky plants sometimes mistaken for cacti that are in spectacular bloom right about now.

Beneath the trees and ocotillos, a wealth of annual plants are still in flower: lupines, primroses, chia, and Parish's poppy. Look closely at some of those plants and you'll suddenly realize you need to watch your step:

They're the larvae of white-lined sphinx moths, sometimes called hawkmoths, and there are thousands of them within a hundred yards. Their mothers laid eggs as the flush of annual plants was emerging from the soil, and they're growing sleek and fat on the desert's bounty here — though they seemed on my visit not to be eating the poppies.

Once you realize they're there, you see them everywhere.

You'd better hurry if you want to see these caterpillars; perhaps as soon as next weekend they'll have dug a few inches into the soil to pupate, emerging as adult moths after another month. The adults fly through the desert throughout the summer, drinking nectar; they'll lay eggs toward the end of the summer to hatch out another brood of caterpillars in mid-fall, November or thereabouts.

But even if you can take or leave fat squirmy insect larvae covering the floor of the desert, come on out. The palo verde blossoms alone are worth the price of admission. Which you should remember to pay at the Cottonwood Visitor Center.