The Desert That Remembered How to Bloom

In March of 2016, hikers arrived at Death Valley expecting the usual — cracked earth, pale rock, the silence of a landscape that seems to have forgotten what green looks like. What they found instead stopped them cold. Wildflowers stretched as far as anyone could see: gold poppies, purple phacelia, white evening primrose — an ocean of color across a valley that had baked in drought for nearly a decade.…