'It was like Woodstock': inside the town hit by super bloom mania
The town of Lake
Elsinore sits at the edge of a canyon newly bursting with color. Fields of
poppies, lupins and other wildflowers spill across hillsides – usually covered
with brown, scrubby plants – as though poured from a bucket of paint.
In the last few weeks,
large swaths of southern California have been transformed into a colorful
canvas of flowers. This type of “super bloom” has happened before, but this year
is especially intense – an unusually wet winter following years of drought,
combined with the aftermath of a brutal wildfire season, has set the stage for
what many predicted would
be the best bloom in years.
But the pretty picture
has a dark side: the hordes of super bloom tourists overwhelming small towns
without the infrastructure to handle the sudden influx. This season, Lake
Elsinore has
become the poster child for the super bloom tourist invasion. On a
recent Sunday, the town more than doubled in population, bloated with an estimated
100,000 visitors hungry to see the flowers. “It was like Woodstock,” says the city’s
mayor, Steve Manos. “An absolute apocalyptic scenario.”
Manos, a second-term
mayor with a gap between his teeth and a warm smile, has a good sense of humor
about the ridiculous situation he’s found himself in, where fury over the
influx of tourists has prompted some residents of his town to threaten –
albeit, maybe in jest – to burn the fields of poppies to the ground. Speaking from his
modest office, a whiteboard covered with traffic-planning scribbles hung on one
wall, Manos lays out how his town’s poppy fields went viral – attracting
Instagram influencers and even celebrities such as Michael Jackson’s son,
Prince Jackson. “It became a social media frenzy,” he says... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/23/it-was-like-woodstock-inside-the-town-hit-by-super-bloom-mania