California has record rainfall this year and as a result, the desert is full of flowers and the Anza Borrego Desert outside of San Diego even had more flowers than it had since 2005 -what's known as a super bloom.
Even the second you get out of your car you're hit with flowers everywhere.
They seem to grow in every color -pinks, reds, purples, greens, yellows, blues, whites and more!
And it was amazing how many flowers were growing on some of the plants.
The visitor's center is filled with fascinating information about the area, including the archeological history of the park (there's even an archeological research center on site) and information about the wildlife and plants living there.
The variety of plants there is pretty incredible and you really do see flowers everywhere.
It's particularly impressive if you have already been to the park any other time of the year and saw the grounds with little but scrubby plants and cactuses.
The "super bloom" title certainly seems appropriate when you can't walk more than a few feet without bumping into another cluster of flowers.
You can't even walk around without getting covered in pollen (as well as the usual dust and sand drom the desert).
While the trails are what you might expect, there are some surprisingly nice amenities at the trail heads including actual toilets with real plumbing and spigots to refill your bottles (and you'll want to get a full refill when you start because it's hot out there).
We chose the Palm Canyon Trail because there were a lot of reports about there being bighorn sheep spotted in that area recently.
We didn't see any sheep, but we kept our eyes on the hills the whole walk just in case -which was great because the normally brown hills were colored with wild flowers.
While we didn't see any sheep, we spotted plenty of evidence of wildlife, including places where they might sleep and their droppings.
And we saw a few lizards. We even saw a quail, though it flew away too fast for me to get a picture.
The wildlife diversity wasn't the only amazing thing there. Everywhere you looked there was some different type of plant -even big knotty trees.
After walking next to a dry riverbed for over an hour, you actually stumble on river water, which is why the bighorn sheep were spotted on that trail so often.
And then you spot a waterfall, which looks tiny in the picture but is actually a good size, but the giant boulders make it look tiny.
It was a really cool waterfall too -with all the water pooling inside the rocks before going down the waterfall.
The Palm Canyon Trail name isn't just clever -this canyon is named after the palms growing in a real life desert oasis.
We actually stopped walking about here because the trail started getting a little more risky and we were pretty exhausted after already walking for about three hours.
The cool water was so relaxing and made the next three miles back to the car a little more relaxing.
Of course, walking around in the desert is a lot easier if you happen to go when it's 75 degrees out.
We really chose the perfect day to visit. On top of the nice temperatures, there was also a cool breeze blowing so strongly that we couldn't use the parasols we brought (not that we needed them).
One of the coolest things we saw on the walk was the fact that everywhere you went there were different plants.
In the shady part of the canyon near the waterfall, there were much more green, luscious plants -including this weird tree that looked like it had caterpillars growing on it.
On the south side of the canyon, these little pink flowers started popping up out of the sand all over itself.
And the fluffy flowers and blue ones seen here only popped up near the end of our walk.
Interestingly, even the insects seemed to have preferred areas like the flowers. On the south side of the canyon, we were constantly trying not to step on these beautiful spiderst that we barely saw throughout the rest of the walk.
We even stumbled upon a beetle mating ground with most of the plants holding 6 or more pairs of these orange and black beetles making love.
And on the way back to the car, we found where all the caterpillars were munching down on weeds to fatten themselves up before building their cocoons.
My personal favorite flowers were those growing on the cactuses -and this little guy stood out to me as my favorite plant from the entire trip. It seems like a fitting final image to this post.
While the flowers are starting to die off, there are still a few areas filled with blooms, so if you live in Southern California, I highly recommend taking the trip out there as soon as possible to see what's left of the super bloom before it's too late.