Valley of Death - Super Bloom!

Yesterday LeAnna, Oscar and I made the trek out to Death Valley National Park to see what's up with the 2016 "Super bloom".  This year has been described as the best desert bloom in Death Valley since 2005.  Death Valley is not very far from Las Vegas ~ 1.5 hr, but it is HUGE, so a good bit of driving is necessary to see much of the park.  The loop we took yesterday encompassed only the southeastern 1/4 of the park.  Still, we left at 7 am and didn't get home until 6:30 pm!  The driving was mostly pleasant, about a 1/3 was on empty gravel/dirt roads.  The area around Badwater Basin, the white scar in the map above and below, was the only area with lots of tourists.  We didn't linger there.  Most of the time we had the roads to ourselves and stopped whenever to take photos or have a look around (which was often!)  We drove the loop clockwise and stopped in the funky, desert spa town of Tecopa for a beer and fries at Death Valley Brewing Co. at the end of the day.  It was awesome!  A new favorite spot to visit - only an hour away. 

A combination of late fall rains and warmer than normal temperatures has resulted in a widespread bloom throughout a large portion of the southern Death Valley.  The map below does a good job of showing the huge extent of the bloom.  As the season progresses the bloom should move north and up, in elevation.  Right now, it's still in the southern range, at nearly the lowest elevations.  The most impressive thing about the bloom to us was the sheer extent of it.  It was hard to capture in pictures and although I like the pictures we took, they don't do it justice.  If you want to see more about the bloom, Desert USA has an awesome article where we got a lot of our info for this trip, including the google image below.

The photos are roughly in order so they go from south to north as we drive up through Death Valley.

These tall yellow flowers were by far the most common, but we saw at least half a dozen other species in bloom as well. 

These small succulent looking plants were really cool. 

This orange parasite that looks like Donald Trump's hair was infecting all the creosote along a certain stretch of the road.  It felt like cornsilk and was slightly greasy.  Not sure what it is. 

The classic Zabriskie Point.  There's always a lot of people here but it's worth it. 

This picture and the next few are from Dante's Point.  We'd never been here before and I'm glad we made the 10 mile side trip.  It overlooks Death Valley from about 4000' above.  The large, white dry lake bed, in the photos below, is Badwater Basin (-279 ft elevation) which you can also see in the first two maps.