Part 1: Flowers along California Highway 190

Before reaching Death Valley I asked a gentleman eating dinner, as we were, at the Longstreet Hotel on the Nevada/California border, if there were any flowers this year.  I asked because he was wearing his National Park Service uniform, so I assumed he would know.  He was a road repair supervisor.  He said yhat in some protected places there are a few flowers.  Look for splotches of color as you enter the valley.  So that is what we did, and here was a splotch of color almost small enough to miss:

The elevation here was 3,000 feet above mean sea level.  This particular flower was tiny:

It grew in family groups, with just a very few neighbors:

One of its neighbors was this purple beauty:

Moving down to 2,000 feet, there was a small display at a pull-out (perhaps more pavement that shed water from the little rainfall here onto the surrounding soil allowed them to grow here as well as they did.  

Some of the inhabitants of this tny flower patch deserve a second look:

To the east of this spot, mesquite was doing very well too, in full bloom:

I could not resist this sprightly lone flower on its tall stalk:

The mix of limestone and volcanic rock masses beyond this mesquite bush remind me it is time to look at rocks now.

 See the sunset through a roadside rock

 See the same sunset continue from Zabriskie Point

 See another sunset from Dante's Peak

 See the Death Valley sand dunes and Badwater Salt Flats

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