California's Last Great Grassland

An explosion of color, an untouched landscape, and the horrifying scars that threaten its borders.

If you’ve never stood on a ridge at Carrizo Plain during a superbloom, feeling the wind stir fields of golden poppies while the hillsides pulse with color like something straight out of a Van Gogh painting, you’re missing one of California’s greatest hidden wonders.

For most of the year, this place is a quiet, sunbaked grassland—California’s largest still-intact native prairie. But when the conditions align, when the winter rains soak the soil just right, Carrizo Plain becomes something else entirely. Hillsides glow with yellow coreopsis. Vast fields of California poppies, baby blue eyes, and purple phacelia blanket the landscape. Even the cracked salt flats of Soda Lake seem to shimmer under the weight of it all.

And the best part? Unlike the wildflower hotspots in Anza-Borrego or Antelope Valley, you don’t have to fight through lines of traffic to see it.

When to Go

Wildflower season at Carrizo Plain typically peaks between March and April, but timing is everything. Some years, the bloo…