Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve

USA / California / Quartz Hill / Lancaster Road, 15101
 hills, state park
15101 Lancaster Road
Lancaster, CA 93536
www.parks.ca.gov/default.asp?page_id=627

Each spring, the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve comes alive with the seasonal surprises of the Mojave Desert Grassland habitat. The duration and intensity of colors and scents vary from year to year, affected by differences in winter's precipitation. Wildlife includes gliding hawks, singing meadow larks, lots of side-bloched lizards zipping across the trail, gopher snakes and rattlesnakes. If you're lucky, you may spot a coyote or bobcat. Benches located along the trails make good places to sit quietly and watch for wildlife. Numerous burrows around the trails may house mice, gophers, kangaroo rats, beetles, scorpions, or snakes that have taken them over.



Boundaries not exact
Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antelope_Valley_California_Poppy_Reserve
Nearby cities:
Coordinates:   34°44'6"N   118°23'24"W

Comments

  • yeah, the boundaries expand eastward.
  • Oh, and The Poppies bloom in April.
  • I saw them in April of 2003, my sister and her family went out this way on a day trip out to Ventura to take our minds off the passing of our father that month.
  • The last of the Coast Range foothills were in near view all the way to Gilroy. Their union with the valley is by curves and slopes of inimitable beauty. They were robed with the greenest grass and richest light I ever beheld, and were colored and shaded with myriads of flowers of every hue, chiefly of purple and golden yellow. Hundreds of crystal rills joined song with the larks, filling all the valley with music like a sea, making it Eden from end to end. The scenery, too, and all of nature in the Pass is fairly enchanting. Strange and beautiful mountain ferns are there, low in the dark canons and high upon the rocky sunlit peaks; banks of blooming shrubs, and sprinklings and gatherings of garment flowers, precious and pure as ever enjoyed the sweets of a mountain home. And oh! what streams are there! beaming, glancing, each with music of its own, singing as they go, in shadow and light, onward upon their lovely, changing pathways to the sea. And hills rise over hills, and mountains over mountains, heaving, waving, swelling, in most glorious, overpowering, unreadable majesty. When at last, stricken and faint like a crushed insect, you hope to escape from all the terrible grandeur of these mountain powers, other fountains, other oceans break forth before you; for there, in clear view, over heaps and rows of foothills, is laid a grand, smooth, outspread plain, watered by a river, and another range of peaky, snow-capped mountains a hundred miles in the distance. That plain is the valley of the San Joaquin, and those mountains are the great Sierra Nevada. The valley of the San Joaquin is the floweriest piece of world I ever walked, one vast, level, even flower-bed, a sheet of flowers, a smooth sea, ruffled a little in the middle by the tree fringing of the river and of smaller cross-streams here and there, from the mountains. Florida is indeed a "land of flowers," but for every flower creature that dwells in its most delightsome places more than a hundred are living here. Here, here is Florida! Here they are not sprinkled apart with grass between as on our prairies, but grasses are sprinkled among the flowers; not as in Cuba, flowers piled upon flowers, heaped and gathered into deep, glowing masses, but side by side, flower to flower, petal to petal, touching but not entwined, branches weaving past and past each other, yet free and separate -- one smooth garment, mosses next the ground, grasses above, petaled flowers between. Before studying the flowers of this valley and their sky, and all of the furniture and sounds and adornments of their home, one can scarce believe that their vast assemblies are permanent; but rather that, actuated by some plant purpose, they had convened from every plain and mountain and meadow of their kingdom, and that the different coloring of patches, acres, and miles marks the bounds of the various tribes and family encampments. http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/a_thousand_mile_walk_to_the_gulf/
This article was last modified 4 years ago