A lesser-known national park 'superbloom' is back in NorCal

May 2-In an Instagram video posted Friday by Redwood National Park, a botanist strikes poses within a "superbloom," beckoning visitors to come experience the elaborate display of purple flowers. "I have something to show you," the employee says while reclining in the grass, as the camera pans up to reveal a sea of spiky lupine flowers behind her.

"Lupine Superbloom at Redwood," purple text overlay reads.

The invitation may feel surprising, considering California's fraught relationship with its superblooms and the environmental damage the springtime spectacles have been known to cause. Some conservationists even take issue with the word "superbloom," due to its tendency to draw unruly crowds that trample the flowers.

But the official announcement is not without precedent: Death Valley National Park trumpeted its own bloom in March. And certainly, the National Park Service has good reasons for wanting to educate Americans about the treasures within their national parks. In grabbing viewers' attention with information about where to see a superbloom, the botanist also gets to explain why they've proliferated this year - and, crucially, how to responsibly appreciate them.

Off a remote road within Redwood National Park, more than a six-hour drive from San Francisco, this sporadic lupine bloom mostly attracts locals and people who happen to be visiting the park already. This year, it sprang up in an area just before the Lyons Ranch Trailhead, "covering the Bald Hills with their gorgeous purple color and sweet scent," according to the national park's social media post, and is expected to last through May.

The reason there's a bloom this year, the park botanist explains, has to do with a prescribed fire that was intentionally set to burn off flammable materials and prevent catastrophic wildfire.

"We are returning fire to this landscape, and we're realizing that one year after a fire, we end up with a lot of vegetative lupines," the botanist says. "But two years post-burn, just like the burn that they did in this drainage two years ago, we end up with a lupine superbloom."

The unnamed botanist goes on to explain that while there are no park-designated trails in the area, elk and other animals have created informal trails that humans can follow. "Make sure you stay on those trails," she says, giving safety warnings. "... And of course, we never pick the lupine."

For Greg King, the executive director of the Siskiyou Land Conservancy and author of "The Ghost Forest," a book that covers the history of America's redwood parks, it feels ironic for a national park to be advertising a superbloom on social media. King remembers the superbloom at Folsom Lake in 2021, when everything got trampled, he says, and that was largely thanks to social media.

But King also wanted to stress that he appreciates the leadership of the park, and he understands there are upsides to sharing the lupines with a wider audience.

"People need to take in the beauty of nature in order for us to better understand why we need to protect it," he told SFGATE by phone. "But given that this is a protected ecosystem, it might be better to not really advertise it. Or maybe afterward?"

In looking over the park's Friday Instagram post, King found that the video already had 712 likes after just a few hours. That troubled him. "If even a third of those people go there, that superbloom can be wrecked," he said. "If you're advertising a superbloom on social media, and you have so many followers, people are going to take your word for it and go there ... it's not going to be good because it's completely unregulated. There's nobody watching."

Justin Legge, a naturalist and guide who leads private tours through Redwood National and State Parks, also has mixed feelings about the video. He would have preferred it to begin with the message about being gentle and not trampling the flowers, which he feels got buried, he told SFGATE. And he takes issue with the word "superbloom."

"It's a good bloom this year, but I don't know if the term 'superbloom' fits," he said. "It just gets people excited, which leads to damage."

Legge is aware of many locals getting jazzed up about the lupine bloom this year, and he knows photographers have been going there for wedding and prom shoots. He's also heard reports of people standing in the flowers and lying down on top to snap selfies for social media.

"People can be so annoying," he said.

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This story was originally published May 2, 2026 at 10:40 AM.