Thanks to Lee Poulsen, Mary Sue Ittner, and others for providing information on the "centennial" flowering of the southern California deserts. I decided to make my visit to Death Valley, which flowers even less frequently than the other arid sites, and bought a plane ticket to Las Vegas for March 13-15. If anyone wants to share a rental car, let me know. However, I was unable to book lodging, since almost all the Las Vegas hotels that have Internet listing are full, or cost way too much. I'm taking a tent and a sleeping bag in case I can't find a roadside motel that isn't full of hookers and meth freaks. I had always wanted to see Las Vegas, as an example of the worst my country has to offer, but apparently not this time. Fear is not a prominent component of my personality, but I thought the loathing might be educational; nonetheless, I won't pay $300 a night to wallow in loathing. Not unless it included the ancillary recreation celebrated by the late Dr. Thompson, and that wouldn't really work on a botanical excursion: you wouldn't want to try to identify plants when you were seeing square out of one eye and round out of the other. On to the flowers! Jane McGary Northwestern Oregon, USA