The Desert Five-Spot (Eremalche rotundifolia) has to be one of my favorite desert wildflowers. I don't see it often because it is rarely blooming during my customary visits to Death Valley National Park in February. It's mysterious because it always seems to be hiding its five spots in a globular-shaped bloom that doesn't seem to open out entirely. For these reasons, our visit at Death Valley National Park was extraordinary. We saw some of the Five-Spots in all their revealed glory.
We were on the third day of our Semi-Super-Bloom Tour of California. We were seeking out not the news-making corners of the state that are attracting tens of thousands of people, but the quieter places that haven't been in the news because they didn't quite as much rain as the places like Elsinore and the Antelope Valley Poppy Preserve. There are flowers out there, maybe not as abundant, but beautiful just the same, and there were no crowds.
Death Valley is the driest place in North America, and the hottest place in the world (so far). Wildflowers are a precious gift in such a place, although they are not in any way out of place. Life finds ways to thrive in even the harshest of Earth's environments, and the flowers of Death Valley are no exception. The seeds can lie dormant in the soil for years, and once they germinate they can grow fast and lay down more seeds for the future. In the process the plants become a food source for all kinds of insects and animals, and as such are an important link in the ecosystem.
Knowing where to look for wildflowers is important when the rainfall is more sparse or later than usual (as is the case in 2019). Many of the usual tourist magnets like Zabriskie Point and Badwater were lacking in flower displays but a drive south towards Jubilee Pass and the ruins of Ashford Mill (15 miles or so) provided some scattered color. We saw what I assume were Yellow Cups (above) and Phacelia (below). Gentle corrections are encouraged!
I haven't figured out the name of the flower below yet.
But Desert Gold is hard to miss. When a super-bloom does occur in Death Valley, there are millions of them on the slopes of Jubilee Pass. There were scattered patches of them, especially along the highway, where the runoff from the pavement provides an extra edge in the water supply for the seeds.
Hairy Sand Verbena is a familiar sight from super-blooms past. We found a few of them along the road near Ashford Mill.
These are plants at the cusp of existence. They arose out of some late storms that provided the water needed to germinate, but it is a only few short weeks before temperatures soar and the desiccating winds begin to blow. Life will once again go into hiding to wait out the searing months.
It used to be a "junk" landscape...the kind of place where locals dumped their garbage and shot up old cars. Off-road vehicles ran roughshod over the relatively barren slopes. It wasn't private property. It was owned by the federal government, specifically the Bureau of Land Management, whose original goal was to give the land away, but in the end no one wanted it. The land, with poor soils nearly useless for agriculture, languished.
But times and attitudes change. There was a reason for the poor nutrient levels in the soils, and why grass, that would have at least allowed for grazing, failed to thrive. The underlying bedrock was composed of ultramafic rocks like serpentine, dunite and peridotite. The rocks are rich in iron and magnesium, with significant amounts of toxic elements like nickel or chrome. Only the hardiest of plants can tolerate these chemical conditions, although there are a few that can thrive in this harsh environment. When the ultramafic rocks are weathered, the iron is released to react with oxygen in the atmosphere to form natural rust minerals like hematite and limonite. The brightly colored soils earned the locality its name, the Red Hills. They form the ridges west of Chinese Camp in the Sierra Nevada Mother Lode between Highways 108 and 132.
By the 1990s public efforts to protect and preserve the unique biology and geology of the region succeeded when the BLM declared 7,100 acres of the region (about 11 square miles) an Area of Critical Environmental Concern. Trash and garbage were removed, trails were laid out, and a parking area constructed. Regulations limited off-road use and target shooting. The region finally received the recognition it needed.
The "park" includes seven very rare species of plants, including two endemics, species found nowhere else in the world (the Red Hills Vervain, and the Red Hills Ragwort). The unique nature of the flora is immediately apparent when approaching the area from the west. The environment of scattered oaks and widespread grasslands gives way abruptly to Buckbrush and Gray Pines. Grass is practically non-existent, unable to thrive on the poor soils. The region has a decidedly barren look.
But then the rains arrive. In the late winter and early spring, the wildflowers burst forth in a display of bright colors. Wildflowers in other parts of the Mother Lode are often hidden by the high-growing grasses. With grass a much diminished species, the wildflowers blaze forth.
We went up into the Red Hills today to see how things have progressed now that we've had a wet year. It's a bit early, but a fair number of flowers were visible on the slopes, including Monkey Flower, Golden Poppy, Brodiaea, and Five-spot. The lichens provided even more color.
The intermittent creek running along the main road through the park sported a healthy flow of water allowing us a chance to see the other unique species in the ACEC: the Red Hills Roach (Lavinia symmetricus), which is a fish, not a bug.
The Red Hills Roach is a subspecies of the California Roach, a member of the minnow family. It's only found in a few drainages within the ACEC and nowhere else in the world. The streams run dry for much of the year, but small seeps and springs maintain permanent pools where a few fish can survive. There were serious concerns about whether the fish would be able to survive the horrific drought of the last decade, but they managed as they have through time.
I got a poor picture of one of the roaches, but a teaching colleague of mine, Ryan Hollister, has posted some underwater shots of the fish on the move.
The Red Hills are wet from months of above-average rainfall, and the plants are growing fast, and will be blooming in profusion in the next few weeks. If you can spare a moment, head into the hills and give the ACEC a chance to impress. It is a truly unique environment found nowhere else in the world.
We saw exactly two poppies blooming. In a few weeks there will be thousands.
It has a clumsy name that only a bureaucrat could love, but the Red Hills Area of Critical Environmental Concern is a fascinating place in the Sierra Nevada Mother Lode. It was for decades a sullied hidden treasure, used for dumping and target shooting. But as biologists and geologists started to study the region, they found a unique biological island in the normally oak-studded woodlands of the Mother Lode.
The uniqueness of the area was tied to the underlying soil, developed on the serpentine and ultramafic rocks of the Foothills Terrane, slices of the ocean crust and rocks from deep in the Earth's mantle that had been added to the western edge of North America some 200 million years ago. Serpentine soils lack many of the nutrients required by "normal" plants like grass and oak, but are loaded with metals that are actually poisonous to plants as well. Plants that survive in this strange other-worldly land have to be tolerant of this harsh chemical environment. Some of them are very rare, and a few are endemic, found nowhere else in the world. Because of the prevalence of iron, the soils are usually a deep reddish brown, giving the hills their name.
This was the single Monkey-flower we found. There will be many more!
The delineation is sharp. When one turns off of LaGrange Road onto Red Hills Road one sees oak woodlands and open fields thick with grass. But only about a mile in, the oak and grass suddenly give way to Ceanothus shrubs and Gray Pine. Grass is almost nonexistent, with various flower species making up the ground cover. Much of the year the ground cover is dead and dry, but for a few weeks in the spring, the hills burst into color, and there is a spectacular show of wildflowers, dominated by Monkey-flowers and Poppies.
February was an incredibly dry month, no doubt delaying the onset of the spring flower show, but the heavy rains of March have left the soils wet, and sprouts are popping up everywhere. We were there today to look things over, and we could see that land is about to burst forth in another week or two.
I wandered over to the creek to see if the fish were around. The Red Hills host a rare and endangered subspecies of the California Roach, the Red Hills Roach (Lavinia symmetricus). The fish were for a short time thought to be extinct when the extended drought dried up the intermittent creeks that they called home. But a few spring-fed pools persisted during the driest times, and the fish are doing okay.
They were in a frenzy of feeding or breeding, or just doing some heavy partying when I found them. I caught some video below. All in all, life is returning in the foothills during these brief weeks before the hot dry times come again all too soon.
I could have made up a detailed geological description of the geology of this alluvial plain at the south end of the Death Valley graben. This is a geology blog, after all. But we were there in the middle of February during the most extraordinary flower show, a "superbloom", in a decade. A series of fall storms were spaced just well enough to wake up the myriads of seeds that hide in the soil, biding their time and waiting for the right conditions to bloom. And this was the time. I'm showing flowers today!
First and foremost is the Desert Five Spot (Eremalche rotundifolia). I'm in Death Valley every year during February, and I might see a few flowers scattered about even in dry years, but I only find the Five Spots during years like this, and I have almost no good pictures of them. That changed this year!
The slopes were covered with Desert Gold (Geraea canescens). A few Desert Golds seem to sprout in the dry years, but if there is water, these are the flowers that turn the slopes and fans bright yellow. It almost feels like walking through alpine meadows, yet one can never escape the sense that these flowers are growing as fast as they can, setting seeds, and dying as the hot winds begin to blow (and the hot winds can come at any time of the year).
Another dependable flower even in drier years is the Desert Sand Verbena (Abronia villosa). There were lots of them in the washes at Ashford this year.
The Ashford Mill was built to process gold ores from a mine a few miles away in the Black Mountains. A bit of gold was produced over the years, but the total output was described as providing the owners with little more than "groceries and lawsuits". Not much is left beyond a few walls and foundations, but they provide a decent frame for viewing Telescope Peak.
The Black Mountains form the eastern wall of the south part of Death Valley, and they are one of the most rugged mountain ranges to be found anywhere. The steepness results from the rapid uplift of the mountains (or rapid subsidence of the valley floor, or both), and the slow rate of erosion in the exceedingly dry climate of eastern California. In this season of "plenty" (in the relative sense, of course), they provide a somber backdrop to the rich display of flowers across the valley floor.
In the next post, we'll check out a few other flowers from another spot just up the highway.
