Poppy Fields at Antelope Valley
After a stay in Bakersfield following our successful trip to see Superbloom wildflowers in the Carrizo Plains, Ken and I set out for the nearby Antelope Valley Poppy Reserve early the next morning to continue our California Superbloom road trip. The poppy reserve in Antelope Valley is known for the bright orange poppies, which are one of my favorite flowers, so I had high hopes!
What we saw when we arrived was like a scene out of a fantasy film… Imagine vast fields blanketed with golden orange poppies as far as the eyes can see… Despite all the pictures we had seen beforehand, there is nothing like experiencing the Superbloom in person and we were both stunned by the endless fields of poppies that we saw there on that bright and beautiful mid-April day. It was truly a beautiful and amazing sight and we simply could not believe it was real!
Superbloom in California
Per Wikipedia, “A superbloom is a rare desert botanical phenomenon in which an unusually high proportion of wildflowers whose seeds have lain dormant in desert soil germinate and blossom at roughly the same time. The phenomenon is associated with an unusually wet rainy season.”
A Superbloom of Spring wildflowers in California happens rarely, only after a particularly wet winter, and usually in the desert areas near San Diego and Walker Canyon / Lake Elsinore. This year, however, the Superbloom spread north, to the remote Carizo Plain, and to the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve and surrounding areas. These areas were literally covered with bright orange, yellow, white and purple wildflowers as in a flower-covered world!
Our Trip to Antelope Valley
Since we don’t get to experience the Superbloom in the S.F. Bay Area where we live, I knew we had to drive to Southern California to see this for ourselves!
Our destination was the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve in the city of Lancaster, located approximately 1.5 hrs north of Los Angeles. As it turns out, we spent so much time at smaller poppy fields on the way to and just outside of the reserve that we never made it inside the actual reserve by the time we got hungry for lunch and had to continue our trip to Los Angeles!
As we approached the reserve, we saw that a field next to the reserve had dense clusters of bright golden orange poppies with a number of other people there also, so we decided to stop and wander for a bit and take some pictures. The next thing we knew, a couple of hours had passed already, and it had been almost four hours since we started our trip!
So we didn’t get to go inside the reserve, but we’re happy that we still got to see the spectacular Superbloom poppies of the area! Some people we met at the field even told us that the poppies here were more dense than inside the reserve!
CAMERA INFORMATION
The photos on this page were captured with either the Nikon D750 or the fantastic Fuji X100, the best compact and lightweight travel camera with a 24.3 MP APS-C sensor. All photos were edited with Adobe Lightroom. Read more about my photography equipment here.
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