Wildflowers love Utah’s  desert after rain and snow.

I experienced and photographed my first superbloom – a rare event where a massive amount of wildflowers bloom at once – in May 1979 and have since spent a lifetime pursuing the ultimate Utah desert wildflower photos.

After a winter and spring where the snow and rain seemed to never stop, I saw fields of lupine along the Colorado River near my home in Moab. The opposite of most of the warm-colored desert flora, lupine is a vibrant blue and usually grows at higher elevations, but this one and only time it covered the area called Richardson Amphitheater. I have gone back to the area many times, but have only ever seen a few spindly plants.

Later that year, in what is now a Moab Valley subdivision, yellow bee plant covered giant fields. Many years later, I saw a similar display that was so big I had to use a drone to show just part of it. The smell was intoxicating as I walked through the flowers.

In May 1997, I stumbled onto a superbloom on the way to Capitol Reef National Park. As soon as I left I-70, I was surrounded on all sides by millions of desert primrose plants in bloom. As I drove to Hanksville, stopping often to shoot with my 4x5 camera, I remembered visiting this area five months earlier, when three feet of snow covered the ground, and the roads were unplowed. It had to be that amazing event, I figured, that caused this inspiring sight.

Late on the same day, I was shooting bee flowers near Hanksville with Factory Butte in the background. I looked down to the ground and saw blooms emerging from cracked earth that was  gray but becoming bluer as the sunset approached. Looking straight down, I shot an intimate landscape of that scene, and it later became a bestseller in my Moab gallery. Customers would often ask if I had planted the flowers myself. My gardening skills could never compete with Mother Nature.

Last winter and spring followed a non-stop period of rain and snow in the Moab area. It ended a 20-year drought – the worst since the ancient Native Americans were plagued by the same thing. There was so much snow that I am certain some of it in the nearby La Sal Mountains didn’t melt last summer.

Overall, it was the best bloom I have seen in my 50 years here. One area along the Colorado River had thousands of prickly pear cactus blooms. It wasn’t just the number; at times it was the size. Prince’s plume blooms – spiky yellow sabers – were over 10 feet tall.

I would often spend hours shooting the ultra-crimson blooms of the claret cup cactus and the snowy white primroses that grow along canyon rims. Nature surprises me with its sudden bursts of beauty. Can life in the desert get better than that?