Lifestyle
This iconic wildflower spot can be dazzling. Is it worth the 150-mile trek from L.A. this year?
Carrizo Plain National Monument in eastern San Luis Obispo County is one of California’s most iconic wildflower viewing areas, but is this year’s display worth the 150-mile drive from L.A.?
If you’re looking for blankets of bright color covering the hills, the answer is no.
But if you want a beautiful outing with boundless sky, close encounters with birds, Indigenous and geologic history and undulating waves of grass punctuated by splotches of gold, violet and orange, then definitely yes — but wait a good week or more for the muddy roads to become passable again.
In early March, a friend and I planned our visit for April 14, largely because the rainy season is typically over by the end of March, peak bloom is typically in early April, and given this spring’s cool temperatures, we figured the weather would have warmed by then to encourage a good display. But the first two weeks of April brought plenty of chilly showers to much of Central and Southern California, and during our visit, the temperatures hovered in the mid-50s, and the rain waxed and waned between hopeful moments of blue sky followed by black clouds and water falling in curtains.
The best wildflower display was in a large photo from 2019 of goldfields carpeting a valley hanging in the bathroom of the Cuyama Buckhorn restaurant in New Cuyama.
(Jeanette Marantos / Los Angeles Times)
Truth be told, the best wildflower display we saw during our visit was a 2019 photograph in the restroom of the Cuyama Buckhorn restaurant in New Cuyama — a stunning view of California goldfields (Lasthenia californica) growing so vast in the Carrizo Plain during a superbloom that they looked like a golden carpet stretching for miles.
Truth be told, the best wildflower display we saw during our visit was a 2019 photograph in the restroom of the Cuyama Buckhorn restaurant.
We did see swaths of goldfields during our soggy trip, along with armies of brown sodden tumbleweeds and pockets of other wildflowers, such as purple owl’s clover (Castilleja exserta), which are actually violet; yellow and white common tidy tips (Layia platyglossa); and (rarely) California poppy (Eschscholzia californica). But the most prominent color was the bright green of California’s hills after a rainy spring.
The tall grass was thick and ripply, like wind on water, and often erupted with birds that flew alongside our car and sometimes outpaced us because Soda Lake Road, the lone paved road, was pocked with gaping potholes and puddles of concerning depth.
A superbloom? Not then and probably not this year, according to the rangers at the Goodwin Education Center at Carrizo Plain. The sign behind the front counter told the story. The last three superbloom years — when wildflowers bloomed so densely that they formed quilts of color over the hills — were in 2017, 2019 and 2023, the rangers said, when the region’s rainfall from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30 had, respectively, been 12.29 inches, 16.31 inches and 15.32 inches. So far, the rainfall for 2024’s water year is less than 10 inches — including the unseasonable rain falling April 14 — and more rain this season is not expected.
The sign in the Guy L. Goodwin Education Center shows that the Carrizo Plain’s rainfall this year has been less than in past years with “superblooms” that carpeted the hills.
(Jeanette Marantos / Los Angeles Times)
The Carrizo Plain superbloom on April 16, 2017.
(Raul Roa / Los Angeles Times)
Scenes of the Carrizo Plain on April 14, 2024 during a drive on the paved portion of Soda Lake Road in Carrizo Plain National Monument in San Luis Obispo County. These days, the plain consists primarily of grasses, with sporadic color.
(Jeanette Marantos / Los Angeles Times)
The Carrizo Plain stretches 50 miles between the Temblor and Caliente mountains, a grassy plain and drainage basin where Chumash, Yokuts and other Indigenous peoples hunted and traded before settlers tried their hand at dryland farming. There are a few campgrounds, trails and unpaved roads, but no services (such as gas, water, food and, usually, cell). The temperatures often exceed 100 degrees in the summer and dip down to freezing during the winter, according to the brochure. All but one of the roads, Soda Lake Road off Highway 58, are unpaved, and even Soda Lake Road becomes an unpaved, rutted road five miles south of the Goodwin Education Center, which features restrooms and picnic tables, along with books, gifts and exhibits.
Besides birding, camping, hiking and wildflower peeping, you can walk along the San Andreas Fault on the Wallace Creek trail, wander on a platform trail along Soda Lake, which becomes a “dry, salt-encrusted basin during the dry season,” according to the brochure, and study the pictographs left by Native peoples on Painted Rock, which this time of year can be visited only with ranger guides on Saturdays (reservations required).
It poured rain much of the day, and the nonpaved roads were mostly impassable, except for a short road to the visitor center.
(Jeanette Marantos / Los Angeles Times)
But on Sunday, we couldn’t do any of that because the muddy, unpaved roads were so impassable that even tow trucks were getting stuck, according to rangers. Every few minutes, someone came into the center and asked the same question — is it safe to keep driving south on Soda Lake Road once the pavement ends? And every time, the rangers patiently answered that they definitely wouldn’t recommend any of the unpaved roads for two-wheel-drive cars, or even four-wheel-drive SUVs, unless they had high clearance, nerves of steel and enough money to pay for a tow truck.
The few that braved the back roads drove brawny vehicles that looked like they’d been sloppily dipped into chocolate. As my friend and I wavered about what to do, we spoke with two people who had made the drive. They had a kind of hysterical look and emphatically told us not to try, even though my Toyota Highlander SUV has four-wheel drive. “I can’t believe we made it,” said one wide-eyed woman in a large pickup with mud caked halfway up its windshield. “You’d never get through.”
A few hearty souls were walking in the rain on the platform trail along Soda Lake, but the tiny parking area had so many muddy ruts and puddles that we decided to avoid that too, lest we get stuck. Instead, I grumpily drove back north to California 58 — even though I hate backtracking — and headed east. Our mood quickly improved along this spectacular winding drive through what looked like the verdant, tree-dappled Shire in the Lord of the Rings.
The Cuyama Buckhorn restaurant in New Cuyama. Order the smoked oyster mushroom tacos and check out the bathroom for a gorgeous 2019 superbloom photo.
(Jeanette Marantos / Los Angeles Times)
After our lovely drive south on 58, we turned west on California 33 near McKittrick, and within a few miles entered a hellscape of bobbing oil pumps and acres of power poles and wires between Derby Acres and Taft. Our destination was New Cuyama for a late lunch-early dinner at the Cuyama Buckhorn restaurant on California 166, which runs along the western border of the Carrizo Plain. I heartily recommend this restaurant, which despite its tiny town locale has a sophisticated, upscale bar, wine list and menu (the smoked oyster mushroom tacos with tender blue-corn tortillas — made at the restaurant — are to die for), along with a remodeled hotel.
And when we were done, the clouds were parting, luckily, because our final leg took us west through Los Padres National Forest on California 33, a scenic but winding road where earlier rain had washed out several spots, so we had to stop frequently to wait for a green light to travel along single lanes. The going was beautiful but slow and a little hair-raising as day turned to night.
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Just about every corner of Julie Burton’s Silver Lake studio is filled with sparkling glass jewelry — some real, some symbolic — and whimsical ceramic figures inspired by Midcentury Modern design.
Elegant hand-blown glass vases sit beside ceramic crater pots on warm cherry shelves. Bright teardrop earrings hang from metal tins filled with Japanese cooling beads. In the kitchen, hand-carved ceramic birds, whales, elephants and owls look out from the counters, surrounded by lidded cache pots and heavy candlestick holders that feel good in your hand. Nature shows up everywhere in her studio: rocks in glass jars, pieces of driftwood and tiny “forests” she’s made from glass, brass and walnut.
“I’m a full-time hallucinator without drugs,” Burton says jokingly about her wide range of work. “If I’m not making something, I’m always looking around and thinking about what to make next.”
A metal desk she found on Craigslist anchors the 546-square-foot accessory dwelling unit, or ADU, where she works. Architect Peter Kim designed the space, attached to her garage in Silver Lake, to be private and full of light, with 10-foot ceilings, skylights and glass doors that open onto a large patio with seating.
Her workspace shows how productive she is. Long, colorful glass tubes fill pails on the floor and her desk. Tools are scattered throughout the studio, including a plumber’s torch for melting glass, crockpots for pickling and a dental tool she uses to stamp her logo, VM, short for Verre Modern, onto her ceramics.
At 56, the Los Angeles native took an unusual route to becoming an artist. After earning a degree in political science from UC Berkeley, she worked at Amoeba in San Francisco and later joined the fashion brand Esprit. “I was supposed to be a data-entry person,” she says, “but I taught myself Quark and became a pattern maker.”
In this series, we highlight independent makers and artists, from glassblowers to fiber artists, who are creating original products in and around Los Angeles.
She admits she didn’t really know what she was doing. “I have a habit of taking jobs and changing them a bit. I’ve been lucky to be able to shape the jobs I’ve had.”
At one point, she considered becoming a professor of legal ethics, so, as the daughter of two lawyers, she applied to law school. “That would be an interesting job today,” she adds with a dry sense of humor.
“Built-in desks, cabinets, shelves and a functioning kitchen with counter seating provide a light-filled artist’s studio easily convertible to a spacious living space,” architect Peter Kim says of the ADU.
Burton melts glass for jewelry with a plumbing torch.
She had always loved art, especially glass-blowing, but classes were too expensive. On a whim, she also applied to the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, or RISD. When she didn’t get into her top law schools, she chose RISD instead. There, she majored in illustration and took a six-week winter glass-working course that changed her life.
“I immediately thought, ‘This is the best. I want to do this,’” she says. “I didn’t think, ‘Can I do glass blowing for a living?’” When she realized she didn’t want to create art glass, her professor encouraged her to leave and “save $90,000 on tuition for something she wasn’t 100% behind.”
When a RISD friend introduced her to a glassblower in Chattanooga who had blown glass on an oil rig, Burton moved to Tennessee and worked for the former merchant marine, making what she describes as “funky glass.”
She later moved to New York and worked at the nonprofit Urban Glass in Brooklyn. To pay off her student loans, she also waited tables and tutored kids for the PSAT and SAT.
After a friend gave her a quick five-minute lesson in lampworking — a type of glasswork that uses a torch or lamp to melt glass — she got so excited that she decided to start a jewelry business, although she says she “knew nothing about jewelry.”
Glass necklaces, starting at $140, come in 135 different colors.
After a brutal winter in New York and as her parents got older, she decided to move back to Los Angeles in 2003. In L.A., she met her husband, had a son who is about to turn 15 and continued to grow her Verre Modern jewelry line. Over time, her work expanded to include glass and brass mobiles and wall hangings, which are now sold in independent shops and museum gift stores across the country.
Designer Carol Young has carried Burton’s jewelry at her Undesigned showroom in Los Feliz for 20 years. Young says that Burton “transforms humble glass into modern heirlooms — simple, elegant, quietly precious pieces for women who don’t need the obviousness of gemstones or status jewelry. My everyday pair are her clear glass Valenti earrings, which somehow go with absolutely everything.”
When she took a ceramics class in 2015, she started making vases, animals and decor, often hand-building and carving her unique vessels while watching TV in her living room. Like with most things, she says, she made ceramics her own.
“When I was blowing urban glass, I didn’t use traditional Italian glass-blowing techniques because I worked for a guy on a mountain in Tennessee,” she said. “I didn’t know anything about jewelry, but a five-minute lampworking lesson set me on my path. If someone who does ceramics for a living were to watch me do what I do with clay, they’d say that’s not the right way to do it.”
Burton worked in a studio on Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles for 20 years before she and her husband added the ADU in 2023. “It was built with the idea that we might live in the studio someday or let a family member live there,” she says, adding with a laugh: “It’s embarrassingly nice as a working studio. That is definitely not how my studio downtown looked.”
Burton’s kitchen features Inax Japanese ceramic tile and untreated cherry cabinets.
The cutouts in the fence around her patio just outside the ADU are lined with her ceramics, sand dollars, driftwood and rocks from Burton’s travels. “I’m inspired by nature,” she says.
The one-bedroom, one-bathroom ADU was built on an unused side yard of the large corner lot, so the two-car garage could still be used for storage and parking. Architect Kim says, “While converting a garage to an ADU can add living space or rental income, they’re often small, need a lot of structural work and take away storage.” He adds, “Building an ADU on unused space lets you keep the garage and, like with Julie’s ADU, creates a spacious, private front patio connected to her studio and living room.”
Burton looks back on her unique career path and feels grateful she can choose her own direction. When she studied illustration at RISD, she recalls being surrounded by talented drafters. “I wasn’t the best illustrator, and I remember the professor told me that half of illustrations are ideas. That was inspiring.”
That idea continues to inspire her art, even after many years.
“I’ve tried welding, woodworking, painting, drawing, glass-blowing, lampworking and working with clay,” she says about working with her hands. “Give me a medium, and I’ll give it a go.”
Burton works on a facet bowl in her Los Feliz living room.
(Ariana Drehsler / For The Times)
San Francisco Ballet artistic director Tamara Rojo is known for taking risks. She says that, with the exception of Nutcracker, “every time you bring back the same work, less people will come. You are cannibalizing yourself. So that’s not really a long-term strategy that you can rely on.”
Karolina Kuras
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Karolina Kuras
One of the first things Tamara Rojo did when she became artistic director of the San Francisco Ballet in 2022 was to commission a major new work on a very hot, very San Francisco topic: AI.
“I wanted to be somewhere where the answer is, ‘Let’s try,’ rather than, ‘We’ve never done it this way,’” Rojo told NPR about her decision to move to a city known globally for innovation. Rojo had spent decades working in the United Kingdom, first as a principal dancer with the Royal Ballet and English National Ballet and then as artistic director and lead principal dancer with the English National Ballet.
The ballet she commissioned for San Francisco, Mere Mortals, was boundary-pushing on a number of fronts.
San Francisco Ballet’s new work about AI, Mere Mortals, presents a departure for the nearly 100-year-old dance institution.
Chris Hardy/San Francisco Ballet
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Chris Hardy/San Francisco Ballet
The jagged, earthbound movement, grainy electronic-driven soundtrack and pulsating AI-generated visuals of the hour-long ballet, presented a departure for the company programmatically. Also, Rojo’s choreographer pick, Aszure Barton, was the first woman ever commissioned to create a full-length work in the San Francisco Ballet’s nearly 100-year history – in an industry where most new dances are still created by men.
“What I love about Tamara is that she is defiant in what she believes in,” Barton said at the San Francisco Ballet’s headquarters during a break from rehearsing Mere Mortals. “This was a huge risk for her. It could have failed.”
Ballet can be a pretty conservative artform, with many companies trundling out Swan Lakes, Nutcrackers, and Cinderellas year after year. Every now and again, though, someone like Rojo comes along and truly shakes things up – even if that has meant ruffling tutus in the process.
Moving beyond limits
Rojo’s desire to move beyond accepted limits is a hallmark of her career. “She has extraordinary ambition,” dance writer Rachel Howard said.
Rojo was only 19 when she volunteered to represent her small, Madrid-based dance school and company at the prestigious Paris International Dance competition in 1994.
During her years as a principal dancer with the Royal Ballet, Tamara Rojo danced many famous roles including Princess Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty. In this 2006 dress rehearsal at The Royal Opera House, the Cuban ballet star Carlos Acosta partnered Rojo as Prince Florimund.
John D. McHugh/AFP/Getty Images
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“I don’t know what happened, but my hand went up,” Rojo said. “I didn’t think about it. I just went ‘me!’”
She won gold, and soon went on to dance for the Scottish National Ballet, the English National Ballet, and, starting in 2000, the Royal Ballet.
The ballerina became known for her consummate technique as well as her ability to bring emotional depth to roles like Odette/Odile in Swan Lake, Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty, and Giselle.
“Tragically sensual as one could want,” wrote New York Times critic John Rockwell in a review of Rojo’s performance of a duet from Ondine at the Lincoln Center Festival in 2004.
She also somehow found the time to earn a Ph.D. in the psychology of elite dancers from the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid.
“She was truly one of the great international ballet stars of the last 40 years, at least,” said Howard.
Daring and success
Rojo has taken that same boundless ambition from the stage to the artistic director’s chair — making moves that match daring with success.
As the English National Ballet’s artistic director and lead principal dancer from 2012 to 2022, she helped transform the company into an international dance powerhouse, in large part through her radical approach to programming. Rojo’s efforts included bringing ballet to the Glastonbury Festival for the first time in the event’s history, and commissioning an Indian Kathak dance-infused reimagining of the beloved classic Giselle from choreographer Akram Kahn.
She also managed to keep the company financially afloat by offering up crowd-pleasing fare like The Nutcracker and a “swashbuckling romp” of a production of Le Corsaire, and oversaw its move from a cramped building in the “old money” South Kensington neighborhood of London to sprawling new studios in hip Canning Town.
Akram Khan and Tamara Rojo, pictured in London in 2013, have become frequent collaborators.
Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images
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Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images
“Rojo was hugely resourceful and creative about how she revitalized that company,” Howard said.
Sitting in her office at the San Francisco Ballet in dressy white sweatpants and an extravagantly ruffled blue blouse, the Spanish native, who turns 52 on Sunday, said the survival of her artform depends, at least in part, on risk-taking.
“Other than Nutcracker — which is this fabulous thing that keeps us all alive — every time you bring back the same work, less people will come,” Rojo said. “You are cannibalizing yourself. So that’s not really a long-term strategy that you can rely on.”
A risk pays off
The risks Rojo has taken with Mere Mortals seem to be paying off.
The production was recently remounted in San Francisco (it premiered in 2024), and will also be seen by audiences at the Edinburgh International Festival and Sadler’s Wells in London this summer. According to the company, it has brought in millions of dollars in ticket sales and drawn crowds of first-time ticket-buyers to the San Francisco Ballet.
A scene featuring dancer Wei Wang in San Francisco Ballet’s Mere Mortals.
Chris Hardy/San Francisco Ballet
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Chris Hardy/San Francisco Ballet
Many of them have stuck around for the post-performance DJ parties. These are part of Rojo’s ongoing desire to open things up by turning the company’s lobby into a friendlier space involving collaborations with local cultural groups and artists.
“We have this platform. We don’t have to be a gatekeeper. That’s actually bad for the arts,” Rojo said. “And so who else can we invite to be part of our actions?”
Perhaps most importantly for the company, Mere Mortals inspired a whopping, $60 million gift from an anonymous donor — one of the largest ever given to an American ballet company. This windfall is mainly earmarked to fund new work. Barton, the choreographer, said she remembers when Rojo invited the donor into the rehearsal room.
“She’s very convincing when she believes in something,” Barton said. “If I had the means, I would give it to her too.”
A difference of vision?
But not everyone is on board with the changes she’s made and her leadership style.
In 2018, during her time leading the English National Ballet, the U.K. publication The Times quoted a group of unnamed dancers who it said had accused Rojo of perpetuating a culture of intimidation and downplaying injury. Those dancers also objected to her romantic relationship with one of her company’s lead dancers, Isaac Hernandez, who moved with her to the San Francisco Ballet. They have a son together, but have since separated. NPR has not independently confirmed the allegations.
Tamara Rojo and associate artistic director Antonio Castilla observing rehearsal for the San Francisco Ballet’s recent production of Don Quixote.
Lindsey Rallo/San Francisco Ballet
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Lindsey Rallo/San Francisco Ballet
In a 2018 statement, English National Ballet said the company had worked with Rojo “from the start to implement improvements across the company,” including better access to medical care, more training for managers and a new building. Arts Council England, which funds and supports the arts across that country, said at the time it was satisfied with the new policies and processes put into place; English National Ballet said it worked with “unions and staff to ensure that feedback was heard and concerns were addressed. Asked about the allegations this week, the ballet told NPR that “No formal grievances were substantiated.”
Looking back, Rojo says that it was challenging to learn how to be a manager while still dancing, and to make changes in an industry where management is so male-dominated. A 2025 report from the Dance Data Project revealed of the 217 artistic directors leading classically based dance companies in the U.S. and internationally, 30% are women, while 70% are men.
“I came in very strong and very fast,” Rojo said. “And that, combined with ‘Women that succeed need to be put in their place,’ was very difficult.”
Tamara Rojo and Isaac Hernandez in London, 2016.
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Chris Jackson/Getty Images
It’s hard to say if similar disagreements over leadership happened when she took over San Francisco Ballet. A handful of high-profile company members have left, including Hernandez. The dancers declined to comment. San Francisco Ballet said the number of roster changes is similar to the number before her tenure.
“Not everybody’s going to agree with my vision,” Rojo said.
Some San Francisco Ballet dancers concur.
“Like any leadership change, sometimes people feel aligned with it and sometimes not,” said principal dancer Sasha De Sola. “The role of an artistic director is to bring their creative vision and continue to build.”
Cultivating dance leaders of the future
Part of Rojo’s creative vision is an unusual, new two-year program aimed at identifying and training the next generation of dance leaders while they continue to perform on stage. De Sola is a participant.
“Many times you’re required to almost wait until the end of your [ballet] career to be able to pursue these things,” De Sola said. “And I feel grateful that I’ve been able to do these in tandem.”
Rojo said she believes ballet dancers are capable of being great leaders if they’re taught how to do it. “You just need to have a vision that is specific and relevant to the institution that you want to direct and that is financially sustainable,” she said. “And you also need to make great art.”
Jennifer Vanasco edited this story for broadcast and web.
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