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No thanks to a dry winter, visitors to the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park this spring won’t get to enjoy a wildflower “super bloom,” but an unexpected rainstorm on Wednesday afternoon has raised hopes for a late-season burst of color in early April.
Borrego Springs officials said last week they’re enjoying a moderately busy wildflower visitor season, despite COVID-19 rules that have continued to restrict restaurants to outdoor dining, canceled on-site tourist events and kept the doors locked at the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park visitors center. But that’s an improvement from last year, when the pandemic bloomed just a couple weeks into the peak season of March and April. Stay-at-home orders in spring 2020 temporarily closed the state park and all restaurants, hotels, non-essential businesses and even community parks.
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By Mary Forgione
California’s deserts can be magical during wildflower season. This probably isn’t one of those years, and it has nothing to do with our pandemic cancel culture. The traffic-stopping orange poppies from Lake Elsinore to the Antelope Valley likely will be no-shows because the fall-winter season has been drier than usual.
“Nothing is blooming at all,” Death Valley National Park spokeswoman Abby Wines said in an email. “Usually, bloom on the valley floor is mid-February through early April. Given that nothing is blooming yet, and that we didn’t have much precipitation in the fall and early winter, it will not be a spectacular bloom.”
SAN DIEGO
“How old were you when you went on your first hike?” he says.
It’s not rare to hear that this hike, the one they are on, is their first, said Belmonte, who is a program coordinator with Latino Outdoors San Diego.
It’s a sign, he says, of the economic, social and cultural barriers Latinos face to accessing the outdoors.
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“There are cultural misconceptions that (outdoor spaces) are only for certain people, and we are working to break those stigmas,” he said.
Latino Outdoors San Diego exposes Latino families and individuals to outdoor recreational activities such as hiking, kayaking and beach barbeques to minimize assumptions that might discourage them from exploring new spaces and hobbies.
FAIRFIELD-SUISUN, CALIFORNIA
A $5 billion water project could drill through Anza-Borrego park. Is it a pipe dream? [The San Diego Union-Tribune :: BC-CALIF-PARK-WATERPROJECT:SD]
SAN DIEGO It would be arguably the most ambitious public works project in San Diego history.
The envisioned pipeline would carry Colorado River water more than 130 miles from the Imperial Valley through the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, tunneling under the Cuyamaca Mountains, and passing through the Cleveland National Forest to eventually connect with a water-treatment plant in San Marcos.
An alternative route would run through the desert to the south, boring under Mount Laguna before emptying into the San Vicente Reservoir in Lakeside.