FLOWERS BETWEEN SEARCHLIGHT, NEVADA, AND NIPTON, CALIFORNIA
Part 4 of 5
Earlier in the year, late January to be exact, two things suggested why this year might not be too bad for flowers: snow in the lower mountains and water in the usually dry lakes!
A few months later, in the Nipton area, these scenes showed what happens when there is a bit of precipitation in the cooler months, plentiful flowers on the 'beavertail cactus'
A yellow sheen on the desert floor from creosote blooms:
Below that yellow exuberance there were quite a few tiny contributions to the floral display:
And racing along between these colorful midget plants was this very large creature:
Back to a larger scale, "prickly Poppies" are not shy along the roadsides:
If you looked here before you will know that I called these white flowers 'Jimsonweed,' but a very nice lady named Audrey who knows her flowers has set me straight, they are "prickly poppies." Thank you, Audrey.
And speaking of the road, let's go east and over a rise of about 4,500 feet towards Searchlight, Nevada. The road, once you enter Nevada, is called the Joshua Tree Highway, for good reason. In late January, this was the scene, suggesting, again, that there may be flowers this year:
And sure enough, a few months later, these denizens of color and attractors of bees and butterflies arose amongst the plentiful Joshua Trees and Yuccas:
The blue flowers? Looked like the 'Utah daisy' to me,
And the white fuzzy plant below? I don't know, could it be a pretty parasite?
Apricot globemallow' was plentiful along this road:
The 'apricot mallow' in this picture is incidental to showing the differences between the Yuccas on the left and the Joshua Trees on the right. They are close relatives, but very different:
A 'desert trumpet' is in the left foreground of this next photo:
Time to turn left at Searchlight and head home. Another day well spent.
But of course there were other days, other locations, and other flowers, as you can see by visiting the other pages in this series.