Death Valley Wildflowers, Rainfall and Super Blooms

So called “super bloom” years make it easy to find wildflowers in Death Valley, but they’re difficult to predict. A “1000-year rainfall event” hit Death Valley in early October, 2015, flooding Badwater Basin. There was more rainfall in late November refreshing the pool of water through December. Then just as the water seemed poised to dry up, there was rain again in early January 2016. The high precipitation volume and frequent re-watering maximized blooming and growth, while the early start enabled an early peak, as early as late February in places.

Let’s look at a few more seasons for Death Valley wildflowers, and see if we can identify some patterns to the rainfall vs. wildflower puzzle. 2010 yielded widespread blooms in April and May across a large geography and range of elevations. Badwater was flooded in mid-March. The season seemed shifted late by a couple of months. So decent rain volume enabled a bloom, but a late start shifted the peak late. With plants stressed from oncoming heat, varieties like desert gold was short and didn’t seem to grow as many branches, with many 8-10″ stalks instead of nourishing 36″ branching “bushes”. Fortunately the consistent height still provided a fine visual display.

The precipitation was widespread, from Artist Drive south and west to through the Panamint Range and Eastern Sierra. Brittlebush was particularly strong in the Panamint Range, blooming profusely there, to a degree that I haven’t seen since. Chuckwallas seemed more visible than usual there as well. They could be seen basking to metabolize as much nutrition as possible before the feast ended.

Spring 2011 offered some similarity to 2010, with standing water on Badwater by early February. Wildflowers were strong in much of the Mojave Desert, but in Death Valley I found them mostly in the far north end of the park. One big rain wasn’t enough.

I explored a fair amount of Death Valley again in 2012, but it was a very sparse year for wildflowers.

In 2013, the spring season was light with sporadic wildflowers, then November had a bloom in the north from August rains. So at least some wildflowers bloomed within 3 months or so of the rains.

April 2014: much of Death Valley has not gotten much rain in the past few months, wildflowers were doing really well 3000-4000 feet up in the Panamint Mtns. The northern end of the Park was stunning! Again, some strong areas based on rain shower patterns.

Spring 2015 was again muted down below, but a strong wildflower year in distributed and higher elevation sites in Death Valley.

The big event of 2015 was heavy rain in October, said to be a “1000-year rainfall event”. It flooded Badwater salt flats extensively, and by soaking the ground all over the Park, set up the spring 2016 super bloom! Here’s some coverage of the aftermath:

So what can we make of all this? At first glance you need rain, not a common thing in Death Valley, where the average is about 1.9″ in Furnace Creek. There was that decent bloom in November 2013 after August rain, so we know that wildflowers can follow rain by about 3 months. There was some rapid blooming, if not widespread, after decent rain on March 6, 2019. But for more widespread flowers, you need a rain to trigger germination and more to water the growing plants. And rain in Death Valley is almost always distributed in patches, so you need patches from different storms to hit the same spots on the ground multiple times. And rain falls more consistently at higher elevations, so it helps to know what higher canyons have bloomed in the past. What about timing? Many seasons of rain in late November, December, and into January were not well-rewarded. So the ground needs to be warm enough for seeds to respond. Many crops need temperatures above about 50 degrees in order to grow, and a regions potential is measured in “growing degree days” over 50 degrees. So while it’s great that we’re looking at a fairly wet pattern that will span from early December through the third week of January at least, it would be best if additional rains come in February to coax more germination under warmer conditions, and to water any already-germinated seeds.

So as of January 12, I’m not quite ready to call a great desert wildflower season yet, but I’m cautiously optimistic! We could have a season like 2017, where the main valley was nearly bare, but some higher elevation sites were excellent in mid to late March. Or it could be like 2014, where there was also an intense localized bloom out of the valley, but the peak was not until well into April. In 2010 that was a really nice patch of desert gold down in Death Valley from Artist Drive to Badwater, but I ran across it in April when few people were still visiting to see it. Or it could be like 2015, where the bloom was again in April, at higher elevation and in off-road locations that few Park visitors ever see. Some of these may have been triggered by rain after warming and before high heat. Higher elevations offer more moderate temperatures overall, so they may be more conducive to setting up a start-to-finish wildflower bloom that doesn’t span the cold winter months. We saw this in November 2013, when a heavy August rain triggered a healthy November bloom in the northern end of the Park.

We offer a Death Valley “adventure” trip March 17-22 that promises decent opportunities to find wildflowers in all of these locations as we traverse a wide swath of the Death Valley backcountry in pursuit of landscape and dark sky Milky Way photography. It’s nearly full, but when it fills we we can add a second session taking a similar route in reverse March 23-28. Given the possibility of April blooms, we could add April 14-18 or 20-25 as well (also for landscape and dark sky Milky Way photography).

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