a quest for wildflowers

So, mom mentioned to me briefly on the phone during final exams week that there was an unprecedented wildflower bloom in Death Valley this year and it would be peaking during Spring Break and that it might be fun to take a road trip down there. I think she was joking. I took it pretty seriously. She also thought that Death Valley was in Northern Califonia. It is actually between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, approximately 1100 miles south of McMinnville. When she picked me up from an incredibly long train ride across the country she foolishly asked me what to do. "Go to see the wildflowers", I replied. Never mind that I had just sat on a train for 55 hours, road trips are always fun. The next morning, at 6:00am (a compromise between my idea of early -- 4:00 and hers -- 6:00) we were off. Here are the results:
We've explored Northern Oregon, but after passing Eugene we were both in foreign territory. it was either too dark or too rainy to see much but by the time we entered California, we realized why we don't want them overtaking Oregon. First, they have some serious problems naming town. The first town we encountered was affectionately called Weed (and boasted a clever sign, "Weed like to welcome you" that warrented a picture but the rain had other ideas). Besides Weed, the upper half of California is rather uncreative at naming roads. For several hours we passed exits like the one below:

Soon, however, we reached towns with far more interesting names. Mainly Los Baños, Liberal Avenue in Corning, and Boron (my favorite):


We ended up spending the night a few hours outside of the national park because we had already driven 17 hours and were both pretty tired. The next morning, right before we entered the park we decided to fill up with gas. It was the most expensive gas ever purchased in the US:

The first pass we went over, Jubilee Pass, we saw a couple of flowers and I was amazed so we stopped and started taking pictures. Cars kept driving past us -- it wasn't unitl about an hour later that we realized why. There were far more flowers a few minutes down the road:


Here are some of the flowers we saw: (for a more complete look, check out mom's blog for an upcoming photo album)

A lonely desert gold sunflower, an unnowkn flower, and a desert chicory


Gravel ghost and mom's amazing photo of pebble pincushion

My personal favorite plant that we saw was a parasitic plant called toothed dodder. It inserts suckers into the tissue of its host plant and lives entirely off of it. Here is has engulfed a young Creosote bush:


Alas, there is more to Death Valley than flowers. We took some hikes and a wade in a very salty lake:

Mom keeping a lookout for enemy approaches from nearby Edwards air force base


Salt encrusted rocks at the unusual lake on the valley floor


Death valley from the golden canyon


Me, wading in some very salty water

After listening to a talk by a botonist/ranger where we painlessly learned how to actually identify all the flowers we had been photographing (thanks to his excellent sense of humor), we decided to head back home. Mom was a little tense at times:

but we made it back okay. Road trips rock!