the Wildflowers

One of my favorite parts of our weekend in Death Valley was taking most of Saturday afternoon to go wildflower hunting. The valley is just exploding with flowers, and it was beautiful to see. Some were easy to find, some we had to hunt for. Fortunately every road in the valley has a nice big shoulder for cars to pull over, which we did ... often ... to admire and photograph the different flowers we could find.

This is the only picture I took of any wildflowers that came out half-way decent. Because of the crazy wind, I simply couldn't get one that wasn't blurry. But Caleb has a better camera, and his pictures turned out much better. Anyway, if you look closely, you can see a sea of yellow off in the distance, just below the hills ... that's what most of the valley floor looked like ... covered in wild yellow flowers called Desert Gold.

This is the Desert Gold up close. (This and the rest of these pictures were taken by my more-capable husband.)

This is called Gravel Ghost, and literally grows right out of the gravel.

This was my favorite we found, called a Desert Five-Spot.

This is the Desert Five-Spot plant.

Not sure what this one is called, but its a really bright yellow flower.

This is a desert bush, with really neat curling leaves that grow sideways to protect themselves as much as possible from the hot desert sun.

For the rest of the pictures I took take a look at the website, here. We're still waiting for Caleb to finish working on the much-better pictures he took ... which will hopefully be up soon.