- Some call it a poppy “super bloom.”
- But the mayor of Lake Elsinore, California, calls it a “Poppy Apocalypse.”
- The city had to close Walker Canyon on Sunday due to an influx of tourists. It’s open now.
- The city is apparently overrun with “Disneyland sized crowds” of people looking to take pictures in the fields.
Like all Instagram photo opportunities, it started out innocuous enough.
In early March, the Anza-Borrego in Southern California experienced a super bloom of poppies. The flowers – which stretched out bright orange as far as the eye could see – were a spectacle.
At first, the city of Lake Elsinore celebrated the flowers, which only bloom like this once a decade. But thanks to unexpected rain, this is the second super bloom in the region in two years – and the largest the city has seen in 30 years.
But not all the glitters - or in this case blooms, like, way more than usual - is gold.
In a statement posted to Facebook over the weekend, the city's mayor Steve Manos called the situation a "Poppy Apocalypse" that was wreaking havoc on the community.
The city had instated a shuttle system to get the high volume of visitors to the poppy fields, Manos wrote. The congestion and traffic patterns Manos described in numerous Facebook updates were nightmarish. Porta Potties with signs stating "full do not use," cars snaking down dusty roads, crowds of people, the poppies on rolling hills in the distance.
In a March 12 post on Facebook, Manos said the city had seen an"unprecedented number of visitors" because of the super bloom of poppies. He said the city was looking into solutions to mitigate traffic congestion. However, he urged residents to "avoid the area at all costs " over the weekend.
While he initially noted that the bloom seemed promising for the community - specifically for local businesses - things seemed to have grown dire by Saturday.
"We're short-handed. One of our employees was hit and run by a driver," Manos wrote in a Facebook post. "A rattlesnake bit a visitor. Residents have been screaming at the people directing traffic."
On Instagram, there are over 106,000 posts with #superbloom. Over the weekend, the city did have to close off access to the fields in the now Instagram famous Walker Canyon, as the situation had turned into "chaos." The traffic-causing crowds were to blame, city officials said.
"Our small city cannot sustain crowds of this magnitude," a statement on Facebook detailing the situation said. "Our city is not made for Disneyland-size crowds"
The city, which has 66,000 residents saw an influx of 50,00 visitors over the weekend, leading officials to call the situation a "public safety crisis," the BBC reported.
But by Monday, city officials reopened Walker Canyon with limited parking, noting that it was "not feasible" to keep tourists away from the picturesque location.
The city of Lake Elsinore is already gearing up for the upcoming weekend, as previous traffic mitigation plans proved unsuccessful. One additional challenge on the horizon? Rain. Which, of course, could bring more flowers - and eventually more tourists.
