Wildflowers at Carrizo Plain

[canyonwalker]

Wildflower Travelog #8
Carrizo Plain National Monument, CA · Fri, 13 Mar 2026. 1:30pm.

Carrizo Plain National Monument is a remote park in California. It's tucked between hither and yon, between a couple of mountain ranges that have few roads crossing them. Hither and yon, in this case, are the Central Valley and the Central Coast. When fellow Californians furrow their brows and ask, "Okay, but where is that?" one answer I give is it's 50 miles west from Bakersfield— as that how we got here this morning.

We've been to this park a few times before and explored various parts of it. Today our aim was much more focused: see wildflowers. We stopped at the visitors center to get guidance on where the best blooms are right now, then headed off to one of those areas, atop the Caliente Ridge. Among the reasons we chose to go there first were the possibility of spotting the rare desert candle flower.



As we drove up the ridge on a dry, dirt 4x4 trail we passed through a few fields of blooming wildflowers right alongside the road. The patches of blooms were pretty, though they were nothing like the overwhelming superbloom when we visited here in 2019. We stopped a few times for photos, including in an area just over the top of the ridge. Flowers here (photo above) carpeted the canyon below us.

And that rare desert candle flower?



We hadn't seen it at any of our previous stops. A fellow park-goer even asked us if we'd seen any, as she was on the hunt for it. But right here it was, growing in abundance. And they were in a field with a beautiful mix of other wildflowers, yellow daisies, orange California poppies, and whatever that pretty purple one is. 😅



Hawk often dislikes being in pictures and doesn't always want to participate in an "ussie"— a selfie, but with both of us in it, like in the first picture here. So as a backup plan we made photos with one of her photo stand-ins, "Winter" the red-tail hawk puppet, among the wildflowers.