J. Harry Jones
San Diego Union-Tribune
Signs that a “super bloom” of wildflowers is about to hit Anza-Borrego Desert State Park are popping up across the desert floor about two hours east of San Diego.
Botanists, business leaders and visitors are already buzzing around the tiny town of Borrego Springs, where big changes are overtaking the typically stark landscape.
“It’s incredibly green,” said Kathy Dice, superintendent of the 900-square-mile park, which stretches from the Riverside County line to the Mexican border in eastern San Diego County. “That’s the thing all of us have noticed. I’ve never seen it so green.”
Campgrounds in the park are packed and hotels are encouraging people to book rooms now before they are all gone. At La Casa del Zorro Resort & Spa, even weekday reservations are between 80 and 90 percent full for the next three weeks, said Lynn Bowen in the resorts sales department.
Early blooming flowers include purple desert sand verbena, yellow desert sunflowers and white desert lilies, along with dozens, even hundreds of other species.
More than 5.5 inches of rain has fallen in the desert since mid December, almost as much as falls in the average year.
Botanist Jim Dice, the park superintendent’s husband, said such an explosion of color hasn’t been seen in the area in many years — and its beauty is likely to bring hordes of visitors.
“I think we’re probably a week or two away from the prime annual wildflower bloom,” Jim Dice said. “With plenty of sun this week and 80 degree temperatures, by Friday, Saturday and Sunday we could see a pretty massive bloom. We’re just seeing the very beginning of it right now.”
Early Tuesday morning Chris Baxter got out of her car at the Visitor’s Center, camera phone in hand. “Oh look, Annie! They’re getting ready to pop! They’re getting ready to bloom!”
Baxter and Annie Dennis are visiting from a far different climate.
“For us this feels so good,” Dennis said. “We’ve been stuck in frozen Detroit so this is perfect.”
An hour later, miles away at the mouth of Coyote Canyon, Lynda and John Friar of Pacific Palisades were busy taking photographs of a lone white desert lily that had bloomed amid many other budding plants .
“It’s beautiful this year,” Lynda Friar said. “We’ve never seen it like this.”
At the visitor center in Borrego Springs, a line was already forming by 8:30 a.m. Tuesday and the crush continued throughout the day.
“We’re already having a banner year,” said the town’s chamber of commerce Executive Director Linda Haddock. “You can’t get onto Palm Canyon (Road). It’s jammed with people. The restaurants have people out the doors.”
“It’s going to be a bloom that I’ve never seen before,” she added. “I keep hearing stories from years ago about carpets of purple and yellow flowers. I’m going to be like a big kid, too.”
Though difficult to gauge, Kathy Dice said roughly a half million people visit the park every year. She expects an additional quarter million could come in March alone.
The best places to see the vibrant foliage are constantly changing, so the park has a Wildflower Hotline — 760/767-4684 — to guide people to the best spots.
“The phones are ringing off the hook,” Kathy Dice said.
On Tuesday, the latest update said recent rain was “likely to extend the blooming period for many annuals, including the sunflowers along Henderson Canyon Road which are just beginning to bloom.
“Desert lilies are blooming in profusion in the Badlands including Arroyo Salado primitive camp on Highway S-22. Annuals and shrubs are beginning to bloom at the Visitor’s Center and should continue for a few weeks at least. Wildflowers are blooming at the north end of Di Giorgio Road, drivers of two-wheel drive vehicles should park at the end of the pavement and walk up the road or out onto the flats.”
Potential visitors are also encouraged to visit the Anza-Borrego Foundations website at www.theabf.org.
Jim Dice, the reserve manager of the Steele/Burnand Anza-Borrego Desert Research Center run by the University of California, Irvine, said it’s been about nine years since a really good desert bloom and perhaps 20 years since a spectacular one.
“Just walking around the research center property the other day there are all sort of things I haven’t seen in the six years I’ve been there: Bigelow’s Monkey flower, Blazing Stars — all these annuals that haven’t been around or have been very, very rare recently.”