Gorman Hills Center Gully California Poppies & Lupine

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Los Angeles County
mid morning Saturday April 19, 2003, slide 03I3-35
Pentax 67 AEII, 55>100mm, Gitzo G1325 Mk2
Drum scanned Fuji Provia 100F 220 film to 200mb RGB file
Adobe Photoshop 6.0 processed for accurate image fidelity
Lightjet5000 printed on Fuji Crystal Archive paper
signature top right

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The Gorman Hills are located in northwest Los Angeles County just south of Tejon Pass beside the Interstate 5 freeway. For decades it's color has caught the eyes of springtime drivers along the highway. Like most good wildflower sites in Southern California, the displays of wildflowers vary greatly from year to year with good winter rains a key factor. On April 19, 2003 that was the eve of Easter Sunday, the displays were so remarkable, one might argue they were likely the most awesome wildflowers displays in the state of California during our lifetime. Or IMHO maybe anywhere.

Setting up these displays was a tropical storm about February 12 that apparently concentrated exceptionally heavy precipitation in this area as it made national news. A mudslide up to four feet deep covered parts of the broad I5 freeway for a mile. The previous years since 1998 had been droughty which tends to build up a cache of dormant seeds. Another factor that made this Saturday special was that it was a particularly stormy period for three weeks prior to this date. Hence areas we ventured into were absolutely pristine with no use paths of trampled vegetation. In fact by the end of the day the roadside had become a carnival of people with the vegetation in places looking like an elephant herd had passed through. Saturday was a mostly sunny day with an exceptionally deep blue sky. Further of importance to photographers interested in still foregrounds, the morning was absolutely dead calm with only a slight intermittent breeze in the afternoon. Anyone familiar with Antelope Valley knows a calm April day is rare.

Early in the morning, a photographer friend and I parked on a frontage road west of I5, surveying the amazing colors across the freeway making excited plans to climb the steep slopes above the east side Gordon Post frontage road.

About a dozen cars were soon parked at what would be the main access point for the public during the next month. Big tripods and cameras began creeping up that slope. We however parked to the south, and then climbed an obscure narrow gully. Reaching the upper broad gully above, we were absolutely awestruck by the waist deep jungle of absolutely peaking colorful growth without a track to be seen.

This view is from about elevation 4,050 feet northwestward up a small gully where a patch of Califonia poppy, eschscholtzia californica, stood out amongst other wildflowers. On the right side of the gully are deep blue hued Bentham lupine, lupinus benthamii. The yellow species is California coreopsis, coreopsis californica. Purple flowers are a combination of globe gilia, gilia capitata ssp abrotanifolia and lacy phacelia, phacelia cryptantha. In the near lower left gully one can make out the smaller yellow-orange petals of hairy stemmed fiddleneck, amsinckia tessellata and light purple hued tricolor gilia, gilia latiflora. At the side of the gully mid left, the whitish green flowers are cream cups, platystemon californicus ssp crinitusv. Several other smaller less showy species were overwhelmed below in the green jungle. Note the bare light brown patches of the natural sandy soil responsible for the smooth curving features of the hills. Above the head of the gully one can see the dark stakes from an old deteriorating barbed wire fence.

For this frame I waited for an optimum pattern of decreasing clouds forming atop the ridge. My favorite image of this special day. The saturation of beautiful colors standing at that spot was utterly mind-boggling. Later in the day trampling tracks of others marred the naturalness of the gully bottom. The next weekend we came back to Gorman and were surprised how quickly the showy coreopsis had faded though other flowers as lupine put on a good show for a few more weeks.

Crop at 100% print size:

   David Senesac
   email: sales@davidsenesac.com

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