The Colors Purple…

Reading Time: 2 minutes

A short two day weekend means a short trip. But a short trip doesn’t necessarily mean a disappointing one as the super bloom plays out.

I decided to take a hike in Torrey Pines extension, a hidden piece of Torrey Pines State Park not far from but not on the beach. If you look at the pictures, the very last one is from an overlook on the Extensions’ southwest corner overlooking the rest of the park. If you are familiar with the beach area, the picture might give you a clue as to where the extension is, hidden on all sides by houses and apartments and a school.

But the superbloom seems oblivious to its enclosed surroundings. The hillside is loaded with flowering annuals, bushes, and shrubs of every kind, hiding its normally prominent red rock formations. Black sage, encelia, monkey flowers, yerba santa, onion, San Diego sunflowers, blue dicks, phacelia, snapdragons, and more, carpet the underbrush of the massive Torrey pines that grow here. The black sage is so thick in some parts, that the spires look more like fencing than like foliage. If you like taking pictures of wildflowers as much as I do, the opportunities are endless. Do you want white sage with yellow encelia as a backdrop or purple phacelia with yellow sunflowers as a backdrop or white ivy with purple phacelia and red monkey flowers?

 It makes me think of the line from the movie “The Color Purple”. “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.” I suspect it pisses God off if you walk by the violets and the yellows, and the whites, and the reds, and the oranges, and the blues, and medleys, and the textures, and the shapes, and the compositions, and the views, and everything else in that field God put there for us to experience. I could have taken a picture of everything without feeling like I wasted a shot. I managed to get it down to this. Hope you enjoy.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1vzG9PeOIxSbWOaX90WrYGYqMNBn5rLPA

author.mike.angel@gmail.com

P.S. I snuck in one picture of Lake Hodges and Escondido Mountain stained yellow green from the invasive black mustard from my morning walk with the dogs.

All works are original work of the authors subject to Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licensing.