Natural History Wanderings

Condo Nast Traveler reports

“Doing it for the ‘gram” comes at a cost.

Taking the perfect, once-in-a-lifetime travel selfie can feel like a serious win. But at California’s floral super bloom, the obsession with snapping a flawless photo is taking a serious toll on one of the state’s most beautiful destinations.

Thousands of visitors have flocked to the swaths of blooming wildflowers across California, which span the state and are so large that they’re visible from space. They are also incredibly rare and appear only every decade or so. Instead of staying on the marked trails and appreciating the blooms from afar, however, tourists have started to traipse through the flowers for photo ops, trampling them as they go. People are sitting on, lying down in, and jumping through the flowers, which crush the fragile blooms.

Read full story at  The California Super Bloom Is Getting Trampled for the Sake of Selfies – Condé Nast Traveler

Please stay on the roads and paths and do not walk through the fields of wildflowers or you may be destroying the seeds for future flowers as well as destroy other people’s enjoyment of the bloom.