Borrego Springs Wildflower Fields

Author's Comments

A super bloom is not a guarantee. It is a rumor that occasionally turns true, and when it does, the desert floor around Borrego Springs becomes something I still struggle to describe accurately to people who were not there. The sand verbena goes purple in waves. The desert sunflowers fill in the spaces between, and the ocotillo lights its tips in red against a sky that in March is almost always cloudless. You drive in expecting a field and find instead a kind of weather, color moving across the basin in patches that follow the rain from two months prior. I have been here in years when there was almost nothing. A few stubborn lilies, some brittle creosote, a wind that made the whole valley feel like it was waiting. And I have been here in the years that mattered, when the bloom arrived properly and the news traveled and the dirt roads off Henderson Canyon filled with cars by nine in the morning. Go early. Six, six thirty, before the heat starts to close the petals and before the crowds turn the shoulder of the road into a parking lot. The light at that hour comes in low across the Santa Rosas and rakes the flowers from the side, which is what you want. Frontal light flattens them. Side light gives you the texture of the petals and the shadows between the stems, and that is where the photograph lives. Bring a macro if you have one. Bring a wide for the basin shots looking toward the mountains. And check the bloom report the week you go, because this is a place that either gives you everything or almost nothing, and there is rarely a middle.

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