This could be a great wildflower year in some parts of California, so although I’m on vacation this week I thought I’d pass along some resources, places you can go to find out where the flowers are blooming.

First there’s this map from NOAA depicting rainfall in the western U.S. since September. Note that Death Valley and other areas of the Mojave Desert have received over 150 percent of normal rainfall, so we can expect good flower displays in those areas. Other traditional wildflower hotspots like Anza-Borrego, Antelope Valley, and the Carrizo Plain have also received above-average precipitation.

Carol Leigh has created two great resources for flower photographers: Carol Leigh’s California Wildflower Hotsheet, and the CalPhoto group on Yahoo. Both feature reader reports of wildflowers from around the state. I’ve been a Calphoto member for a long time and it’s a great place to find information about photographing many California subjects, not just wildflowers.

DesertUSA is another valuable site, with wildflower reports for Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and Texas as well as California. Also check out the Theodore Payne Foundation’s Wildflower Hotline.

These links just scratch the surface of what’s available, so if you know of other good sources please feel free to post them in the comments.

Of course I’ll keep you up to date on what’s happening around the Yosemite area in this blog. Right now it’s hard to say what kind of wildflower year it will be in the Merced River Canyon west of Yosemite. We’ve had above-average precipitation, but we need a stretch of warm, clear weather to get the bloom rolling.

As a reminder, I won’t be posting a critique this week, so I’ll post the next critique on March 16th or 17th. See you then!