Wildlife and Wildflowers

This page highlights some of the wildlife we have encountered in Death Valley during the many trips we have taken. This includes scorpions, tarantulas, chuckwallas, bighorn sheep, wild burros, mule deer, rabbits, roadrunners, Kit foxes, ravens, wild horses, pupfish, lizards, snakes, coyotes, and owls. We are still searching for a desert tortoise and have spent a lot of time in the Owlsheads looking for them. But so far, we have just found lots of tortoise burrows and one tortoise shell, but no live tortoises. Many of our wildflower pictures are contained on our actual hiking location reports, but below we have posted 20 of our favorites. We are not wildflower experts, but we just enjoy seeing them and learning about them.

We found this fierce looking scorpion while crossing over from Lost Spring Canyon into Anvil Spring Canyon:

Tarantulas are plentiful throughout the park, especially if you are visiting at the right time:

This chuckwalla lives along the ridge line between Dante's Peak and Mount Perry:

We have seen Bighorn Sheep quite a few times. Here we found them on the cliffs above Bighorn Springs (which is just west of the head of Bighorn Gorge):

We love the wild burros in the park:

We seem to see coyotes on every single trip to Death Valley:

Mule deer are plentiful in the Panamint Mountains:

We watched this rabbit for a while when we were camping at Mesquite Springs Campground:

This roadrunner played around in a tree at our campground in Furnace Creek:

This is a Kit Fox which was briefly caught (not by us) and then released back into the wild as we watched:

We spotted wild horses in the upper reaches of Cottonwood Canyon:

The ravens at Stovepipe Wells are always looking for some hand-outs, but make sure that you don't ever feed them:

The pupfish of Salt Creek are absolutely adorable:

Flower 1-- Desert Five-spot (Eremalche rotundifolia)

Flower 2-- Bigelow Monkeyflower (Mimulus bigelovii)

Flower 3-- Death Valley Mojavea (Mohavea breviflora)

Flower 4-- Death Valley Phacelia (Phacelia vallis-mortae)

Flower 5-- Golden Evening-Primrose (Camissonia brevipes)

Flower 6-- Desert San Verbena (Abronia villosa)

Flower 7-- Panamint Mountain Mariposa Lily (Calochortus panamintensis)

Flower 8-- Scented Cryptantha (Cryptantha utahensis)

Flower 9-- Rock Daisy (Perityle emoryi)

Flower 10-- Pebble Pincushion (Chaenactis carphoclinia)

Flower 11-- Death Valley Goldeneye (Viguiera reticulata)

Flower 12-- Desert Gold (Gerea canescens)

Flower 13-- Desert Tobacco (Nicotiana obtusifolia)

Flower 14-- Globemallow (Sphaeralcea ambigua)

Flower 15-- Gravel Ghost (Atrichoseris platyphylla)

Flower 16-- Indian Paintbrush (Castilleja applegatei ssp. martinii)

Flower 17-- Mojave Aster (Xylorhiza tortifolia)

Flower 18-- Notch-leaf Phacelia (Phacelia crenulata)

Flower 19-- Rock Nettle (Eucnide urens)

Flower 20-- Panamint Daisy (Enceliopsis colvillei)

Annie and Jered appreciate the wildflowers of Death Valley:

And Steve spends time photographing them on every trip:

This picture was used on the main page of the site during its first year of operation. Now it is used here to welcome you to twenty of our favorite Death Valley wildflower photos:

Lizards are probably the most common wildlife encountered in the park. This collared lizard was hanging out on a rock in Surprise Canyon:

We have seen lots of snakes while hiking in Death Valley. This spotted leaf-nosed snake was basking in the sun in Panamint City:

We spotted a pair of owls in Marble Canyon (Saline Range) during a hike in July:

This is a butterfly which flew along with us for a while in Indian Pass Canyon. We found an abundance of butterflies there and also on top of Dry Mountain:

A tortoise shell we found in a side canyon of Talc Canyon in the Owlshead Mountains. This was not the way I had hoped to find a desert tortoise in Death Valley for the first time and hopefully in the future I can replace this picture with that of a live tortoise: