When I first heard of Carrizo Plain in a botany class at Santa Barbara City College back in maybe 1983-84, the professor's description imbued it with an almost mythical quality, as if it existed on another planet, a secret garden of treasure known only to a select few.
Something of that mythic quality lives on despite the fact that it's become a social media darling, the scene of cars parked bumper-to-bumper along its dirt roads.
I've actually never been there during one of the so-called super blooms, but I've seen fantastic carpets of wildflowers, had close encounters with pronghorn (much closer than shown above!), and walked alone among the pictographs of Painted Rock when I had it, and virtually the whole plain, to myself.
Luckily there isn't enough oil under the plain to make it worth drilling for, or all of this would look the same as it does on the other side of the Temblor Range, a vast plain of pumpjacks instead of fiddleneck and goldfields, tidy tips and phacelia.
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