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Famous for its riotous spring wildflowers, California’s Cuyama Valley has new reasons to visit, thanks to a growing creative community of hoteliers, winemakers, and artisans.

- RYAN BRADLEY

DESERT BLOOM

I MUST HAVE BEEN about 10 years old when I first glimpsed the Cuyama Valley. My family and I were driving home from my aunt’s place in northern California when, about two hours north of Los Angeles, my father spontaneously decided to turn off the main highway. What I most vividly recall, almost three decades later, was realising that I was suddenly somewhere quite different from anywhere I’d ever been.

There were windswept plains, beautiful and desolate, flanked by two mountain ranges—one deeply creased and barren, the other scrubby and oaky, golden and green. Very occasionally, we saw signs of human habitation along the two-lane road. It was as though we had stepped not merely back in time but outside of it.

I have returned to this empty-seeming place over the years, most often to pitch a tent on the Carrizo Plain—one of the last remaining ancient grasslands in the United States. Carrizo is one valley over from Cuyama, and both are famous for the explosion of spring wildflowers that, after a rainy winter, can turn into glorious super-blooms, like some giddy god took a paintbrush to the land.

Flowers are the big draw here, although they’re fleeting, lasting only a few weeks in the spring. Rough camping on the plain can be a tough sell. Usually, when I drove out, I went alone.