2022 Change of Seasons and Look of Hillsides

update — March 24 pics at bottom

This entry aims to demonstrate how the look of the local undeveloped hillside (near my home in Westlake Village) changes with time through the year. I will attempt to share similar pictures from the same general location during the mid-afternoon every month or so through 2022. This spot is along Hillcrest in Westlake Village/Thousand Oaks in Ventura County. The elevation is near 1000 feet. The sign at the start of the trail says “Hillcrest Open Space.”

The images above were taken on the final day of 2021. The area had experienced a very dry autumn, with puny rain totals in Sep/Oct/Nov 2021. However, December was amazingly wet, with about 12 inches of rain. Thus, when the photos above were taken, some green grass was starting to make an appearance in the otherwise bare and bleak-looking hills.

Below are images from late February 2022:

January and February were amazingly dry in the region. These are typically the wettest months of the year, but my rain gage caught only 0.07″ in Jan and 0.05″ in Feb. The excessive rains in December supported fairly robust new vegetation growth in February. This month featured a nice and sunny warm spell mid-month with highs into the mid 80s.

March 6 pics below

By March 6, the purple flowers were abundant (especially on the upper slopes) and the green vegetation was filling in nicely. I don’t know what that type of leafy vegetation that is in image #2 above, but it is doing very well right now. Weather conditions continued to be very dry, with nothing so far in March. A couple of cold systems did bring showers to parts of the San Fernando Valley around March 4-5, but these missed Thousand Oaks and Westlake Village. Total rain from Jan 1 to March 6 is only 0.12″ at Westlake Village. I suspect that if we don’t get any rain in March that the grassy areas will already show hints of the yellows and browns that we see in summer.

March 10 pics below

I decided to return with the camera four days later (on March 10) as the leafy weeds along the fence were quickly turning yellow and brown. On March 6, these were still mostly green (two images from March 6 below).

Back to the same spot on March 24 (pics below), two weeks later—still little or no rain since late December. The yellow-flower (mustard?) plants have really grown quickly. The leafy green plants along the fence are a completely dried-out brown.

A nice, wet Pacific storm dumped about 1.5 inches of rain on the hillsides around March 28. This was the first significant rain in the area since late December. The rainy season has been a strange one, with extremely meager amounts prior to December and after December, but with about 11 inches in December. Jan/Feb/Mar was on its way to being about the driest J/F/M on record until the late-March storm. The hills had large swaths of “yellow” by the first week of April. This may have have been aided quite a bit by the late-March storm. Images from April 3 below. Some of the yellow flowers were at eye-level.