Southern California

Wildflower Trail Opens as Potential Superbloom Nears

The seasonal trail, which winds near Diamond Valley Lake in Riverside County, is the place to see poppies and more.

What to Know

  • Diamond Valley Lake Wildflower Trail
  • 1.3 miles long
  • $3 per person, $10 per car

If you installed some sort of high-tech wildflower alert center in your home, the kind of blinking walls often seen in the movies, like, when people go to the moon, then all of those little blinking lights are probably flashing quite brightly at the moment.

For early March is go-time for several spots around Southern California, from the deserts to the desert-adjacent places that are slightly less arid than the deserts.

And superbloom buffs are keeping very close watch on which places are popping, thanks to all of the copious amounts of rain we've recently seen.

Which means, yes: Your wildflower alert wall should be going off right now, or will be, soon.

One location that is surely programmed into your wildflower watch center? The Wildflower Trail, near Diamond Valley Lake in Riverside County, which just debuted for the season on Saturday, March 2, 2019.

The footpath is open Wednesdays through Sundays, do note.

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Also note that the name of this popular trail says it all: There shall be wildflowers, during a few fantastic weeks each late winter and spring.

But the news gets even more fantastic: A superbloom is expected for 2019.

If you wandered the Wildflower Trail in 2017, you might have seen oodles of poppies (hello, orange), arroyo lupines (so blue), Canterbury bells (they're purple), and Forget-Me-Nots (the white petals) doing their glorious thing.

The coming weeks are expected to deliver some or all of that dazzle, again, so best try and time your visit to the Hemet-close trail.

"The flowers should last through April along the hillsides of the lake trail, a 1.3-mile loop that is considered easy to moderate," says a statement from the Diamond Valley Lake people.

Kelly Lam, director of Basecamp Hospitality (the outfit behind the Diamond Valley Lake Marina), predicts that the mid- to late-March superbloom will "... be way better than it has been in over 10 years."

So that's a good span to program into your wildflower alert center, as far as the Wildflower Trail's best dates go: The final two weeks of March 2019, with some room to visit in April.

The cost to take the trail?

It's ten bucks per car to park and $3 per person to enjoy the Wildflower Trail.

Find more flowery info sprouting now, at the Diamond Valley Lake site.

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