Wildflowers Across the Temblor Slopes
Made during the 2017 Carrizo Plain superbloom, this Fuji GX617 panorama looks across the extraordinarily steep slopes of the Temblor Range. Hillside daisies (Monolopia) sweep across the folded terrain in yellow while the foreground is filled with lacy phacelia (Phacelia tanacetifolia). The large 6×17 cm transparency preserves remarkable detail across the scene, including small scars and breaks where sections of exposed soil have slipped downslope through the bloom.
This photograph was made later in the day during the same 2017 Carrizo trip that had begun with the cloudy early-morning panoramas on the plain. Later, I traveled up a narrow, rough and hazardous dirt road to reach the upper Temblor Range, then continued along the ridge road, stopping at different locations as the landscape and light changed. Much of the day was spent photographing with a 35mm camera, with the Fuji GX617 brought out when the terrain opened into compositions suited to the panoramic frame. The hillsides were extremely steep, and close examination of the large transparency reveals small places where the soil had slipped or broken away, leaving narrow gashes and scars within the wildflowers.
The complete panorama must be reduced considerably for online viewing, making the finer structure of these slopes difficult to see. In this enlarged section, the extreme steepness of the hillside becomes more apparent along with the individual wildflowers and small breaks in the exposed soil. In several places, sloughing has caused sections of the surface to slip downslope, leaving narrow gashes and scars within the otherwise continuous sweep of the bloom. These small changes are reminders that this is a living, continuously evolving landscape—its slopes shifting, eroding and reforming while each season of wildflowers briefly covers the moving terrain.
