Antelope Valley Wildflowers

Transcription

1 Updated - April Where, when, and how to discover the best photography in America Published since 1989 Each spring, the Central Valley of California offers a wildflower display that covers southern deserts, including the Sonoran Deserts, from Organ Pipe National Monument to Anza-Borrego and the Mojave Desert. This newsletter is about my trip to photograph the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve in the Mojave Desert. In the 1800s, great fields of poppies grew wild, all over the state. The only large fields left in California are found here, in the western end of the Antelope Valley. Antelope Valley Wildflowers

2 issue 89 - page 2 CALIFORNIA WILDFLOWERS SF J J Novato Starting from San Francisco, California, I headed south on Highway 101 in early April and followed a scenic route to Highway 25, a narrow, winding two-lane paved road from Hollister to King J The Pinnacles J King City San Antonio J Mission City. Rolling green hills, covered with oaks, line this narrow inland valley. By late afternoon I reached the Pinnacles National Monument where I stopped for a hike and some spring wildflower photo-graphy. J Carrizo Plain Antelope Valley J J Lancaster J LA I entered the east side of the Monument along Chalone Creek, through a blue oak woodland. Meadows were covered with yellow goldfields, a member of the sunflower family, and owl s clover, a purple-red member of the figwort family. Indian paintbrush spotted the roadside. At the Bear Gulch Visitor Center, I picked up several trail guides and then hiked the Condor Gulch Trail, up into the rocky pinnacles along the ridgeline. I headed east on the High Peaks Trail where most of the early wildflowers had started to bloom. Above Hawkins Peak, several California condors were soaring on the updrafts. Hatched from abandoned eggs, condor chicks have been raised in captivity, then released in several remote locations in the Southwest, including the Pinnacles. The almost-extinct California condor, a relative of the common turkey vulture, has large white triangles on the underside of its wings. The High Peaks Trail descends into Chalone Canyon in a series of switchbacks. The trail follows the stream down the canyon and then loops back toward the west to the trailhead at the Bear Gulch Visitor Center. Indian paintbrush and wild iris had begun to appear along the trail. Late April and early May bring heavier displays of spring wildflower color to the Pinnacles National Monument. Up on the High Peaks Trail, I photographed rocky spires and crags (left), the remains of an ancient volcanic landscape. Millions of years ago, this landscape was sliced in two by the San Andreas Rift Zone. The Pacific Plate moved to the northwest carrying some of these volcanic remains 195 miles northwest of their original location. The rest of the volcano, now called the Neenach Formation, lies on the western edge of the North America Plate, fifteen miles east of Gorman, California, in the Antelope Valley, my destination for this trip.

3 issue 89 - page 3 I spent the night in King City. After breakfast, I headed south on Highway 101 to the Antelope Valley. A few miles south of Atascadero, I drove east on Highway 58 through the small town of Santa Margarita. Sixteen miles east of Santa Margarita, I turned north on Shell Creek Road to find a wonderful display of wildflowers spreading along the eastern edge of the Avenal Wildlife Refuge. There were acres of owl clover, goldfields, lupine, and tidytips, but very few poppies. The display was the best I d ever seen along Shell Creek Road. My favorite view was westward, toward the oakcovered slopes beyond the wildflowers. purple and orange. They were covered with wildflowers. Many small canyons climbed into the hills toward the east. Most were filled with wildflowers and enclosed by barbed wire. After spotting a rattlesnake, I stayed out of the deep grass in the canyons and photographed from the edge of the road. This spring, large fields of bright yellow daisies, called goldfields, covered the south end and east side of Soda Lake in the middle of the Corrizo Plain. This high, flat isolated valley is located fifty miles west of Bakersfield. Most of the road from Soda Lake to the pavement of Highway 116 is unpaved. At Highway 116, I headed east, through Maricopa, to Interstate 5. On Interstate 5, I drove south, down the southern end of Californa s Central Valley, and began the climb over the pass called the Grapevine. At the small town of Gorman, I left the freeway and headed east along the Gorman Post Road, into the Antelope Valley. Large fields of poppies covered the steep hillsides above Gorman. Twenty miles north of here, where Shell Creek Road joins Highway 41 at Shandon Flats, there s another wildflower site. It s thirty miles east of Paso Robles, just off Highway 46. The Shandon Flats are not ringed by oak-covered hills. After several hours of working the best tripod locations along Shell Creek Road, I continued driving east on Highway 58, I turned south onto Elkhorn Road, which follows the east side of the Corrizo Plain along the west side of the Temblor Range. These rolling hills were painted in pastel shades of yellow,

4 issue 89 - page 4 The Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve East of Gorman, and west of Lancaster, the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve is located on the western edge of the Mojave desert and just inside the northern boundary of Los Angeles County. From a distance, the low hills rising from the center of this reserve are a colorful landmark. This eighteen-hundred-acre reserve was opened in 1982 to protect some of the most outstanding displays of the California Poppy Eschscholtzia californica, the state flower. On the hill above the center is a large wind-powered electrical generator. When the blades are spinning fast, the sound can be heard all over the reserve. It means that it s too windy to photograph the poppies. My favorite windbreak is made of three 18 x 28 Masonite panels that are painted white on both sides. They are connected with folding hinges made of white Scotch Colored Plastic Tape on the long dimensions. The three, connected, 1/4 thick panels are heavy enough to stand alone in the wind. The Poppy Reserve s entrance is off Avenue I, which becomes Lancaster Blvd, as it skirts the south side of the reserve. The Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve opens at sunrise and closes at sunset. The Visitor Center, half-buried in the hillside above the parking lot, sells wildflower identification guide books, and hard-cover and soft-cover editions of George Lepp s beautiful book on the California Poppy. Check their website for hours of operation. If you are concentrating on close-ups or are shooting large-format images, the abstract blurs of wind-whipped wildflowers just are not acceptable. Close-ups are out when the petals are whipping in the breeze. Early morning photo sessions can be productive. Mornings are calm, with little or no wind, and the low, warm light from a rising sun can be dramatic. Since poppies fold up tight when temperatures drop and when the sun has not yet risen high enough in the sky to warm and open the petals, you may have to wait for them to open. Pack a folding beach chair to use when waiting for wind to stop. It s more comfortable than kneeling on the ground and you can t feel a change in the wind if you are waiting in your car. I also pack sunscreen, a hat, and gloves for crawling around on the ground. I use the small pair of scissors in my Swiss Army knife for snipping off dead leaves and stray blades of grass.these problems are always more noticeable in your finished photograph.

5 issue 89 - page 5 There are five loop trails leading from the reserve s parking lot, for a total of seven miles, including a paved section for wheelchairs. Some of the foot trails are fairly level and easy to walk. Some are longer, steeper, and more strenuous, with a loose gravel surface. None are difficult. Several years ago, I replaced my foam rubber knee pads with hard plastic knee pads with soft foam inserts, the kind that carpenters wear when installing hardwood flooring. The foam rubber knee pads were always picking up cactus needles in the desert. Sometimes, after a few days of wearing knee pads, the straps and buckles can irritate the backs of my knees. That s when I pull out one of those 9x14-inch foam rubber knee pads for gardening. My favorite, the North Trail, heads north from the Visitor Center, then crosses a bridge over a small stream into a flat basin where solid yellow goldfields covered everything this spring. The trail continues westerly, along the reserve s north boundary then heads south and returns to the Visitor Center. The southern part of this two-mile-long loop trail is called the South Trail. It s actually one long loop. It can be walked in thirty minutes. If the weather and wind conditions are good, plan to stay out there for a half-day. When my carbon-fiber Manfrotto tripod doesn t go down low enough for the wildflowers, I pull out the center column and reinsert it upside down. I fully extend the legs and spread them out far enough so that I can lie down between the legs and the camera, which is hanging just above the ground. Along the North Trail this spring were large patches of poppies, smaller patches of deep red owl s clover, lupine, and creamcups. It was definitely the best display in the Reserve. Goldfields (below) seemed to stretch for miles. Smaller than a dime, these daisy-like flowers stand 4-6 inches tall and don t move around much in the wind. Almost a thousand of these tiny yellow flowers can fill a one-square-foot area. The much larger poppy petals whip violently in a strong wind and make photography impossible. A few days of strong wind can shred the delicate poppy petals and spoil close-up photography. After spending three calm mornings shooting along the Reserve s North Trail, I was ready to move on and search for more wildflower locations.

6 issue 89 - page 6 Other photo locations in the Antelope Valley On windy afternoons out in this desert, I back off a bit and concentrate on panoramic landscapes with Joshua trees. Several large groves of Joshua trees on the north side of the Poppy Preserve. One of these groves is on the north side of Avenue D, one mile east of 140th Street West. These Joshua trees are up to fifteen-feet tall, and don t move around much in the wind. Large white clusters of buds were getting ready to open with a few weeks of warmer weather. When I arrived on a cloudy afternoon in early April, the floor of the desert beneath the Joshuas was covered solidly with bright yellow goldfields. A sweet perfume filled the warm desert air and the sky was getting interesting. A light wind from the south was moving a thin cloud layer northward and the sun was shining through. Long streaks of cirrus clouds finished off the tops of my blue and yellow composition. Driving west on Avenue D (Highway 138), I turned north on 140th Street West to find several acres of solid poppies, lupine, and goldfields. On a midweek morning, there were only four parked cars and about six photographers working the edge of the field. It was easy to avoid photographing the tall towers supporting the power lines. They were several hundred feet apart. With a 15mm lens, I can fill the bottom of a viewfinder with sharp close-ups of the smallest wildflowers. With my aperture set at f 22, my depth-of-field extends through the whole field of color and off to infinity. The clouds are sharp too. I don t use a wide-angle lens when I m near power lines or when roads or buildings might be visible in the distance. A right-angle finder makes these low-level shots easier. Stay on the edge of wildflower fields, to include as much color as possible in your viewfinder. I packed up my gear and moved a mile north on 140th Street West to another, even better grove of Joshua trees. There were no foot prints through the wildflowers surrounding the trees and the sky was getting better. Avoid walking through the wildflowers and tramping them down. They don t snap up and recover. Work around the edge of wildflower fields. Stay on established trails. Pick a spot and spread out your ground cloth or set up your tripod without flattening down the wildflowers. Work along the edge of the road, shooting into a wildflower field rather than walking into the center of a field. Please leave the wildflowers as you found them.

7 issue 89 - page 7 Back at the intersection of Avenue D and 140th Street West, I headed east for less than a quarter-mile and then turned south onto an unmarked dirt road. Most of the dirt roads in this valley are unmarked. This is the road that follows the northern boundary of the Poppy Reserve. I followed the most heavily-traveled route toward the southwest and, in four miles, I reached the pavement near the southwest corner of the Poppy Reserve. Across Avenue I, just south of the Poppy Reserve and a mile west, there s another unmarked dirt road heading south. It climbs a short, steep hill for a panoramic, 360-degree view of the whole Antelope Valley from the top. The slopes were covered with large bunches of poppies when I arrived. My best photographs, taken from the bottom of the hill, were filled with bunches of orange poppies climbing up to a blue sky streaked with thin white clouds (below). For this trip, I packed my right-angle view-finder and my rubber-coated canvas ground cloth. I use a three-by-four foot piece of red oil cloth, cut from an old tablecloth. Since it s waterproof, I can drape it over my camera when the rain starts. The road passes through magnificent fields of wildflowers just outside the Poppy Reserve. Hikers, on the trails inside the reserve, can only view them from a distance. I was out there until the sun was so low in the west that the poppies were closing. There are a few No Trespassing signs and some barbed wire fences near the western end of this road. There are plenty of accessible wildflower fields on both sides of the road just north of the California Poppy Reserve. These dirt roads are regularly graded, creating high mounds of earth piled up along the roads. Some of the wildflower fields are four feet higher than the roads. This makes it easy to set up a fully-extended tripod and take closeup photographs of the wildflowers growing along the edge of the berm. For dramatic close-ups of small wildflowers or wild mushrooms, I use my shortest extension tube between my shortest focal length lens and my camera. A 5mm tube behind a 12mm extreme wide-angle lens fills my viewfinder with the smallest blossom and includes the whole landscape beyond, all the way to infinity. For in-the-field reports on California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and Texas is the website for Desert Wildflower Watch at: This website includes some excellent photographs with details on where to find them and how to get there.

8 issue 89 - page 8 Start your explorations of the Antelope Valley at the Poppy Reserve. Spread out and drive the many miles of back roads that crisscross the valley to discover all the wildflower fields. Many the best fields are hidden from view. The Southern California edition of the Delormé Map and Atlas has enough detailed road information for an exploration of the Antelope Valley. More detailed maps are available at the AAA office and at the Mojave Desert Visitor Information Office in Lancaster on Division Street, a halfmile north of Avenue K. The Lancaster Chamber of Commerce is another good source of information on the Mojave Desert. Years ago, the map of the Antelope Valley was laid out in a grid pattern as preparation for development of streets, homes, and towns awaiting the arrival of an expected population. Antelope Valley Services There s been a lot of development here with the towns of Lancaster and Palmdale now almost one continuous community. Highway 14 is called the Antelope Valley Freeway. Shopping centers and homes are advancing toward the east and toward the west, into the Antelope Valley. The city of Palmdale is an aerospace industry center. Pronghorn antelope were once numerous in the Antelope Valley, as the name suggests. The skittish animals were so fearful of railroad tracks laid in 1869, that they all starved to death in one year rather than cross the tracks to their seasonal foraging grounds. The town of Lancaster has a dozen motels. There are also lodgings in the town of Palmdale, a few miles south of Lancaster, and in the town of Gorman, on Interstate 5. When I arrived in Lancaster, I stocked up on groceries for breakfasts and lunches in the field. I packed bottles of water and ice in an insulated cooler. It s a long drive back into town for lunch. During my week in the Antelope Valley, I drove as far north as Avenue A, the northern boundary of Los Angeles County, where I found more large fields of poppies mixed with a type of very low-growing, dark blue lupine, called pygmy-leaved lupine, on the Kern County side of the unpaved road.

9 issue 89 - page 9 All my close-ups of tiny wildflowers are done with my old faithful 55mm and 105mm macro lenses. With my camera set on manual, these old non-auto-exposure, non-auto-focus lenses are still useful, even on a digital camera. I can check my exposures with my handheld Pentax spotmeter, or I can make a guess at the exposure and check the results on the LCD monitor. I fine-tune my exposures, then delete the tests. The lack of an auto-focus macro lens is not a problem. An auto-focus lens tends to wander and select the wrong spot to lock onto when confronted with a busy close-up composition. I leave the focus set on manual for wildflower close-ups. I found only a few patches of wildflowers along Elizabeth Lake Road in the foothills on the south side of the Antelope Valley. The area, hidden beyond the Portal Range, has become developed with homes surrounding golf courses. This narrow, remote valley, in the foothills along the south side of the Antelope Valley, follows the San Andreas Rift Zone, where the Pacific Plate meets the North America Plate. Driving west for fifteen miles, to the end of Avenue K, make a right turn onto 110th Street West and head north. A quarter-mile north of the intersection, large fields of dark red owl s clover (below) were covering the rolling landscape, the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, far beyond all the Lancaster development. The Tehachapi Range, a southern extension of the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range, borders the north side of the Antelope Valley. The San Gabriel Mountains border the south side of the Antelope Valley. When there is no space to set up a fullsized tripod, I pull out my six-inch-long, table-top tripod. It s solid and steady, though not very adjustable. If the ground is uneven and the six-inch tripod is too tall for the shot, I drop a beanbag on the ground as a camera support. Sometimes, I use a 5x7 inch piece of plywood with a small ball-head bolted into the center. My most basic camera support is a twelveinch steel rod, sharpened on one end and threaded on the other end to screw into the bottom of a small ballhead. Depending on the soil, I just push it into the ground and attach a camera. Two unpaved roads leave 110th Street West and wind through the wildflowers. The two roads meet and continue west for three-and-a-half miles. Out near the western end of this road were some very large fields of solid poppies, goldflelds, and owl s clover hidden in low spots where extra rainwater had collected. None of these sunken wildflower fields are visible from the heavily-traveled paved roads. You must get off the pavement and drive the dirt roads. After some wet winters, the hills around the Fairmont Reservoir, southwest of the poppy reserve, are the best places to look for photographs.

10 issue 89 - page 10 Saddleback Butte I found many more native Movaje Desert wildflowers by driving twenty miles east from Lancaster on Avenue J to 170th Street East. Saddleback Butte is a granite mountain top that rises a thousand feet above the surrounding desert floor of the Antelope Valley. Saddleback Butte is a California State Park covering three-thousand acres, established in 1960, to preserve a portion of the Joshua tree woodland, native to this high desert. The park entrance off Avenue J, passes a jumble of large granite boulders surrounding the Ranger Station. The park road continues south for a mile, through a Joshua tree forest, to the campground. Trails, from the picnic area and the campground, meet at the base of the slopes and climb the butte. It s over two miles to the peak. I concentrated on shooting large fields of wildflowers surrounding the base of the butte. The dominant flower in this part of the desert is the yellow desert dandelion with white-tipped petals. Along the trail to the butte were more goldfields, surrounding more Joshua trees, a Mojave Desert native. I watched for desert tortoises, a common sight on a spring morning in the Mojave. They love to eat wildflower blossoms. Don t touch them or pick them up. They are susceptible to diseases that can be transmitted through human touch. On the east side of Saddleback Butte State Park, I headed north on 200th Street East to the Butte Valley Wildlife Sanctuary. It s a Los Angeles County wildlife sanctuary that is bordered by Avenue J on the south, Avenue I on the north, 190th Street on the west and 200th Street on the east East. There is a Butte Valley Wildlife Sanctuary sign on the northeast corner, the highest point in the sanctuary. Beyond the sign, a display of wildflowers spreads out through the Joshua trees. To the south are Saddleback Butte and the snow-covered San Gabriel Mountain Range (left). There are no visible trails across the Butte Valley Sanctuary. On all my hikes through the Mojave Desert, I watch where I step and try to avoid walking through deep grass. The Mojave green is the most dangerous of all rattlesnakes. This gray-green snake is aggressive and has a powerful venom that affects both muscles and nerves. I spotted several black-tailed jackrabbits, one roadrunner, lots of red-tailed hawks, and many small lizards. I saw no snakes in the Antelope Valley. I was told of this location by the ranger on duty at the Mojave Desert Information Office in Lancaster. The information office is off Division Street in a small strip mall. Watch for the brown signs. Later in the week, the weather started to change in Antelope Valley. The winds became steady and a cloudy overcast moved in. I packed up my camera gear and headed north on my way home. Have a great trip and send me an !

11 issue 89 - page 11 more wildflower tips: Tilt lenses on small cameras and tilting lenses boards and tilting film backs on large-format cameras are a great advantage when shooting large fields of wildflowers. A much larger film size is a great advantage when making larger prints. Shooting wildflowers with a large-format camera requires very small apertures and long exposures. Any wind is going to move your camera as well as the flowers. By turning on the over-exposed highlight warning on the LCD monitor of my DSLR, I can double-check every exposure to avoid washed out clouds or white wildflowers. I use a large PhotoFlex LiteDisk, a folding white diffusion screen to soften direct sunlight and block the wind. When shooting back-lit wildflowers, I bounce a little fill light into the shadows with a silver or gold-colored Photo- Flex LiteDisk reflector. With a thirtysecond setting on my camera s delay timer, I have time to wrestle all these windbreaks and reflectors into position. When the wind isn t moving the flowers around, I use longer exposures and smaller apertures, for greater depthof-field and the appearance of greater sharpness. I set my digital SLR to a lower ISO. By the middle of the day, when the breeze starts to move things around, I reset the ISO up to 400, allowing the use of shorter exposures with small apertures. I use a cable release instead of the camera s delay timer to release the shutter when there is any possibility of wind moving my subject. When it s very windy and I still want to try to photograph wildflowers, I use a long, large-aperture telephoto. Shooting wide-open, with an ISO setting of 400 or higher, my shutter speed is fast enough to freeze most motion in bright sunlight. A 400mm f 2.8, with a short extent ion tube, will produce a very shallow depth-of-field. Out-of-focus backgrounds become abstract blurs. Many desert photographers invest in snakebite-proof gaiters or chaps, which can be purchased online. An online search for snake chaps will provide you with a variety of available products.

12 Spring Wildflowers March Anza-Borrego State Park and Joshua Tree National Park in southern California are often covered with wildflowers that may start blooming in late February and arrive in waves through mid-april. Big Bend National Park sees the best wildflowers and cactus blossoms in March and April. April April brings the best weather to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Loggerhead turtles arrive in the summer, during mosquito and hurricane season. Poppies cover Antelope Valley between Lancaster and Gorman, California, during the second week of April. Austin is the center of Texas wildflower country. The peak of the season is usually in mid-april. Late April is wildflower season in the Smokies. May Wildflowers are still blooming in the higher mountains of Great Smoky Mountain National Park. Hills along northern California s Coastal Range are still green and the rhododendrons are blooming in the redwood groves. Skies over Monument Valley are best in May. The dirt roads are dry and summer heat has not yet arrived. Slot canyons along the Colorado River are usually dry and free of mud by late May. Waterfalls are at their fullest in Yosemite Valley. Hundreds of thousands of horseshoe crabs arrive in late May onto the beaches of Delaware Bay to spawn. Huge flocks of migratory birds heading north arrive to feast on the eggs in Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge. My life-long career in photography began at San Jose State University in After college, I enlisted in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, serving as a photographer and darkroom technician. In Germany, my skills and experience with equipment and lab work were developed and polished. I took the opportunity to photograph the beauty of nature in the Black Forest. Returning to California in 1965, I produced industrial and military training films for Raytheon Electronics and began showing my color nature prints. From 1969 through 1981, my photography was exhibited and sold in West Coast galleries. During the early 1980 s, I taught color darkroom workshops, then expanded to include field trips. Former customers, who had purchased my framed photographs, wanted to learn photography. My Pacific Image Photography Workshops offered adventures to the Pacific Coast, the Southwest deserts, national parks, Hawaii, New England, Canada, England, and the South Pacific. The workshops evolved into writing and sharing my adventures with others. Photograph America Newsletter provides information on where, when, and how to discover the best nature photography in North America. Photograph America Newsletter is published quarterly (four issues/year) by Robert Hitchman assisted by technical associate/wife, Katherine Post Office Box 86, Novato, CA All contents of this newsletter copyright Robert Hitchman Please don t make copies for your friends. This is a violation of Federal copyright laws. This newsletter survives on subscriptions.