Spring is almost here! Because of the increase in the amount of rain that we’ve been getting in California lately, there is a “super bloom” happening at Walker Canyon Poppy Fields right now. You definitely want to make the time to see these beautiful and colorful poppies before they are gone.
Contents
Hours
Walker Canyon Poppy Fields is open to the public 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Directions
Parking
You can park for free on both sides of the street right next to the entrance to Walker Canyon. The street stretches pretty far back. One thing to keep in mind: the later in the day you visit the poppy fields, the harder it will be to find parking. When we were leaving (around 9:30AM), cars were parked on both sides of the street as far back as we could see.
Difficulty
This isn’t a difficult hike but there are some steep parts if you want to get a higher view of the flowers. The ground can also be slippery at some parts so make sure you wear appropriate shoes.
Distance
The trail is about 3.5 miles round trip but you don’t need to do the whole trail to see the wildflowers. We only went about half way in and saw plenty of orange poppies.
Walker Canyon Poppy Fields
Brea and I missed the super bloom that happened at the Antelope Valley Poppy Reserve two years but we were determined to see it this year. We did not expect to see the poppy fields at Walker Canyon though!
I saw some pictures on Instagram and after looking at videos from Walker Canyon’s Instagram story, we decided that we were going to make the trip the very next day (Sunday March 10, 2019). We even saw a news story about it being a super bloom which made us want to go even more!
A super bloom basically means that there’s a bunch of flowers blooming at the same time.
We both wanted to avoid the crowds if possible so we decided to make this a sunrise experience. I would highly suggest going earlier to avoid the traffic and the crowd if you’re coming from LA.
We arrived to the poppy fields around 7AM and to our surprise, we were not the only ones there. There were a lot of people there already! The most amount of people we’ve ever seen for a sunrise activity.
One group of people was a photography tour group, so that helped explain some of the traffic. But there was still a lot of people.
You will notice right away that a lot of people brought their dogs (we did too). At one point there were so many dogs around us that it felt like a dog park.
When you first arrive, you will walk on a dirt trail until you get past the yellow railings.
Keep walking and you will start to see some poppies. It’s up to you on how much you want to walk and how far in to the poppy fields you want to be. At the first small hill, Brea found a good spot to fly her drone. The shots from the drone were pretty amazing (stay tuned for that post later).
After Brea was done flying her drone, we walked in further and found a couple more spots to take photos.
Brea wanted to wear a dress, but it was less than 40 degrees out! This didn’t stop other people from wearing a dress though. Some people even wore leather heeled boots. Do what you can for those photos, I guess.
One of the things that you are not supposed to do is to go off the trail. You can tell where people did go off the trail because some of the poppy flowers were destroyed. Just be careful if you are trying to get inside the flower beds and just go where it’s already been stepped on if anything. But please do not add more destruction.
We spent about 2 hours here exploring the poppy fields and we did not even cover the whole area. Walker Canyon Poppy Fields is pretty massive – we did not expect this at all.
These “super blooms” don’t last very long so make sure you go see them while you can! I’m glad that we found this place on Instagram and immediately went to go see them.
