This year’s phenomenal California super bloom was so vibrant with color, you could see it from outer space.
And that’s just where you might have to be to get your eyeballs on the yellow-and-white splendor of Sacramento hot spot Daffodil Hill.
In July, the owners of the bucolic rural tourist attraction and Instagrammer magnet announced that it would close indefinitely.
In a Facebook post, the Ryan family lamented the insufficient infrastructure to handle this year’s hordes of visitors, which led to liability and safety concerns. “The local road system to our Hill became so congested that the wait just to get to our parking area sometimes took as long as two hours,” the family wrote. “As a result, many visitors chose to park their vehicles along the narrow roadways and walk through traffic to the Hill, which was a risky endeavor in itself.”
The message went on to say that since the cars were parked illegally, they, along with the lines of pedestrians, got in the way of emergency vehicles.
This is not the only time this year that pretty flowers could be blamed for gridlock — and the compulsion to take photos for social media is partly to blame.
In March, authorities temporarily closed access to Walker Canyon, whose blooming orange poppies were such a lure for shutterbugs — at least 50,000 of them — that it resulted in traffic jams and overflowing toilets, not to mention trampled flowers. Social media posts called it the “poppy nightmare.”
Other poppy-seeking visitors illegally entered Walker Canyon through barbed wire fence, ignoring directions to stop picking flowers and to stay on designated trails. Rules were emphasized on social media with the hashtag #DontDoomTheBloom.
In one almost unreal incident in March a helicopter illegally landed in the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve, crushing flowers in the process. The chopper’s two occupants jumped out and crushed some more as they stomped around the field — then took off when they noticed a ranger approaching.
As summer’s heat intensified, the flowers are done for the year — but you can still get your super bloom fix wandering on paths through 15 acres of spherical luminescent flowers in Paso Robles, Calif., in a temporary art installation called Field of Light that runs through January.