The California desert is bursting with color thanks to a wildflower explosion happening less than four hours from Los Angeles — but officials warn it won’t last long.

Eye-catching displays of vibrant yellow and purple blooms have already sprung up in Death Valley National Park, just a short drive from LA, thanks to a wet winter that has primed the deserts for an above-average wildflower bloom.

“We are having the best bloom year since 2016 and many sprouts have not yet flowered. The showy yellow Desert Gold is one of the most prominent flowers, but there are a large variety of other species blooming as well,” the park said on its website.

“Low-elevation flowers are blooming throughout the park and will likely persist until mid-late March, depending on the weather. Higher elevations will have blooms April-June.”

The stunning display of wildflowers includes desert gold, brown-eyed primrose, sand verbena, fivespot, phacelia, Mojave Desertstar and California suncups.

“It’s the best I’ve ever seen,” Elliot McGucken, a Los Angeles-based photographer who has visited the park and also witnessed the superbloom in 2016, told the San Francisco Chronicle.

“I definitely recommend getting here within the next week or so.”

However, officials have stopped short of calling it a superbloom, like in 2016, because those only happen under perfect conditions, the National Park Service said.

“While there is no official definition of ‘superbloom,’ the term is usually used when entire hillsides are covered with blooms dense enough to give them a swath of color,” said supervisory park ranger Jennette Jurado.

“We are seeing that on several alluvial fans around Furnace Creek to lower Badwater Basin, so ‘localized superblooms’ might best describe what we are currently seeing.”

The sweeping carpets of color are also popping up all over the state at places like Anza-Borrego Desert State Park along Henderson Canyon Road and at Red Rock Canyon State Park, with displays of primroses and coreopsis on show.

And for those not lucky enough to travel to one of California’s national parks, there’s also a PoppyCam live feed for visitors who want to check out the brilliant hills of orange blooms as they pop up at the Antelope Valley Poppy Reserve from mid-March to May.

These same parks experienced spectacular blooms in 2017, 2019 and 2023, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world to see the colorful show.

The wildflower season typically runs from as early as mid-February through May, with the mosaic of colors changing daily.

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