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Antelope Valley Poppy Reserve

April 3, 2005

However, with all the rains this year, they are calling it the best showing in 30 years. None of these pictures truly do it justice, as it is too expansive, too big to wrap your mind around it.

We visited the Reserve on Sunday April 3.

This 1,745 acre State Reserve, nestled in the Antelope Buttes 15 miles west of Lancaster, California, is located on California's most consistent poppy-bearing land. Other wildflowers: owl's clover, lupine, goldfield, cream cups, and coreopsis.
Seven miles of trails wind gently through the wildflower fields.
The Reserve is located 85 miles north of Los Angeles near the Mojave Desert.
The Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve is located in the western Antelope Valley at an elevation ranging from 2600--3000 feet. It is the high desert. Pronghorn grazed long before then, until the railroad of the 1880’s.

 California Poppies grow best where there is some disturbance. This can be man made by various means: such as disking by farming practices or natural, such as sheep or pronghorn grazing/walking or fire.
Until the early 1970's Sheep once grazed the buttes in the western Antelope Valley. Park management has excluded sheep from grazing the hillsides.

California State Parks does not water to stimulate the flowers, but has a prescribed burn program that uses fire as a natural tool to manage grassland vegetation. Fire has been a part of the management practices for the Poppy Reserve since 1994. Prescribed burning has decreased the exotic species, reduced the ground cover and litter, permitted the native species of wildflowers to grow and bloom better.

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