Anza-Borrego: Go Time for Bloom Time

A delightful desert show is very much happening over the second weekend of March.

What intrepid inventor out there will dream up an amazing device that desert-loving Californians very much need but don't yet possess?

Let's lay out the specs for you: We desire a cute flower-shaped device that sits on our kitchen counters and beeps, insistently, when a particular stretch of typically arid landscape finally dons its annual, late-winter coat of flowers. 

Such a thingamabob would be such a welcome addition to desert lovers' homes. For trying to predict just when desert wildflowers will arrive, and how "blanket-y" they'll be, and where they'll be, and if recent rainfall might have helped, and, and... Someone please invent a blinky, beepy desert wildflower clock, pronto.

But first: Take the second weekend of March, and the days before St. Patrick's Day, and make for Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, where the whole wildflower scene is ultra-super going to town, big time. 

Or not "town" but "desert," rather.

"The magic is here!" proclaimed the Borrego Springs Chamber & Visitor's Bureau in a particularly effervescent Facebook post on the afternoon of Friday, March 10. "Green everywhere and wildflower fields abound! The blooming ocotillo are a wow!"

If you need some wow and magic and bounty in your world, first pick up your map and guide at the bureau's office at 786 Palm Canyon Drive in Borrego Springs.

The Scene

Want to find new things to do in Los Angeles? The Scene's lifestyle stories have you covered. Here's your go-to source on where the fun is across SoCal and for the weekend.

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Get tips. Ask questions. Make a new friend.

There's more information, too, on the official Anza-Borrego Desert State Park page, including wildflower locations, where to go, what to bring, and all of the seriously important stuff you need to know before trekking around the desert.

Read it, love it, learn it, happy high fives.

As for the poppy situation in the Antelope Valley? "The first poppies are starting to bloom on Antelope Butte Vista Point trail!" reported the Poppy Reserve's Facebook page on March 9.

But green, not orange, continues to be the dominant hue throughout the hills, so if you want to see a few poppies hither and yon, they're there, though not plentiful as of yet.

That plentitude could come, keyword: could, so stay tuned, and continue to wish all of your poppy-fervent wishes for a notable bloom.

And wish also for a flower-shaped, kitchen-counter invention that tells us, to the second, with a beep, when and where California's famous wildflowers are making an all-too-brief showing.

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