California’s Gold: Poppy Superbloom at Walker Canyon Trail

Chasing the Super Bloom

Walker Canyon Trail, Lake Elsinore, CA

Activity: Day Hike

Date: March 26, 2019

6 miles, 4 hours duration, 700′ elevation change, rated Moderate

Southern California is experiencing a Super Bloom giving us the best conditions in a generation. Just the perfect combination of rain, after an extended drought, the right temperatures, sunshine and lack of damaging winds are gifting us with magic that has only been seen on a Metro Goldwyn Mayer movie set where a young girl and her dog befriend three strange characters while trying to find the way back home.

Speaking of trying to find their way back home, the horrendous crowds this phenomenon has created has place a hard ship on local residents almost in tears as they are stuck in hours of freeway traffic trying to get home. It has really overwhelmed the area as they are getting 100,000 visitors on the weekends.

That being said, I arrived with my friend Adam on a weekday just after daybreak and there were already 100 cars there. But it was a good move as when we left there were miles of cars and throngs of people. I certainly would not want to be there on a weekend.

It was difficult making this blog as I had 100 pictures of poppies, and I knew they all looked similar, but I just couldn’t help it. With each step it seemed to get better, plus as the sun got higher the poppies open up. That coupled with after we finished the marked trail, you see on the map below, we heard about about an unmarked trail that was even better. It was only a half mile away so we did that trail as well, and you guess it click click click one pic after another.

I hope this article and the pictures do the event justice as it was really stunning to see this in nature. Even going through the pictures I had a tough time cutting out pictures of the poppies, so I hope that they do not put you to sleep as the Wicked Witch would hope.

This shows Walker Canyon Trail, but I was able to go a little farther than the map shows. Then after finishing this trail we took another one that I could not even find as a posted hiking travel on my hiking app.

The poppies were the predominant flower and the star of the show, but there were numerous other beauties as you will see in some of the pictures.

Long after the poppies are gone Walker Canyon will still be a great place for a hike with it’s rolling hills, and mountains in the background.

As the sun peaked it head above the crest of the hills the poppies slowly started to open. By mid day they were all the way open.

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I seriously expected Julie Andrews to come bounding down singing, “The Hills are Alive with the sound of music…”

You can see in this pic that as we finished Walker Canyon Trail it was starting to get a little crazy with people. So glad that we got an early start.