“Desert Gold and Desert Five-Spot” — Desert gold and desert five-spot flowers, Death Valley
This photograph features two rather different Death Valley flowers. The bright yellow desert gold flowers cover gravel benches and fans after wet winter seasons. They were all over the place when we visited in late February this year. The desert five-sot is not an uncommon flower, though it isn’t seen in anything close to the numbers of the desert gold. It is also less obvious due to its smaller blossoms and darker color.
We had stopped at this location in southern Death Valley to photograph the (very obvious!) desert gold and to look for the also-plentiful sand verbena blossoms. But almost any time you stop for flowers in the park, if you look around you’ll find others besides those you came for — and here that meant we found plenty of desert five-spot flowers nearby.
“Wildflowers, South Death Valley” — A flower-covered landscape with a hill and the lower panamint Range.
Is this a so-called “super bloom” year in Death Valley? The term seems subjective, and there does not seem to be a clear demarcation between a really great bloom (which this season is certainly providing) and a super bloom. From what we saw in late February, I think there’s a case for calling 2026 one of the exceptional super bloom years.
There were lots of wildflowers where I photographed this scene at the southern end of the valley. Extensive fields of desert gold stretched across gravel fans and up hillsides. Pinkish sand verbena covered lower, sandy areas. (It is subtle, but if you look closely you can see the pink-purple color between the foreground yellow flowers and the shadowed hill.) Colorful clumps of purple phacelia were everywhere.
An abandoned mill on a steep slope high in the Panamint Mountains.
For someone like me, the first instinct is to think of Death Valley National Park as being mostly wilderness, and then to associate that with the idea that it is a place of little or no human presence. In truth there’s virtually no place in the world where we have not left a mark… and there are many examples in this park. They range from evidence of long-ago native populations and their descendants who still live there to the rather astonishing number of old mining sites. No matter where you go in this park., you are bound to see these things.
In the latter category is the site of Skidoo, where there was once a real town and lots of mining and ore refining… in just about the most unlikely location imaginable. It was near the summit of high desert mountains, far from any paved roads. The ruins of the water-powered mill (an astounding story too long to relate here) sit on a steep hillside, overlooking a remarkable expanse of rugged desert terrain and mountains that extends to the distant peaks of the Sierra Nevada.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.
The ruins of an abandoned mill in the California desert backcountry
During the nearly twenty years since I first “discovered” California deserts, my experience with them has changed. To be honest, as a person largely focused on the coast and the Sierra, when I was younger I didn’t really know much about these wild places, and I wasn’t really attracted to them. It wasn’t until the late 1990s that I actually made a serious visit and began to “get it” about the things that make these areas so marvelous. At first, like almost anyone else, I focused on some of the most obvious and iconic places. But eventually as I returned to these places, especially to Death Valley National Park, I began to push out my boundaries bit by bit. As I did so I discovered many more interesting things about these places, both the natural wilderness and the human history. One of the first experiences that connected me to the human history was an accident. One evening I wandered away from a camp and just sat down on a boulder in an elevated location on an alluvial fan. I happened to look down to see an unusual rock. I picked it up and quickly realized that it was a cutting implement left their by the earliest people to make their lives here — and my notions of the depth and variety of human experience in the desert was profoundly altered.
That human influence has many facets. Certainly the experience of the people we now refer to as “native Americans” is central. (I like Canada’s term: “first people.”) Later settlers showed up for a range of reasons — pioneers passing through, prospectors chasing the dream of the big strike, folks looking for a job, people not well suited to living in the civilized world, and other. They all left traces. The prospectors and miners left lots of them all over the desert landscape, and you can’t travel around these places without running into it. The photograph is a detail from one amazing structure high on a desert ridge, abandoned only recently in the context of the larger scale of history, but still putting us in touch with an era that is mostly gone now from these places.
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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