[Caption: picture 2: A yucca plant blooms alongside an access road to San Antonio Dam above Upland. The heavy growth of the plants this year has been fueled by rains of past seasons and the storms spawned by El Nino {curly cue (tilde) over the "n," please. Thanks.} during the winter months.]

[Caption: picture 3: Wild yucca plants grow all over the hillsides on the roads to Mr. Baldy. Some of the plants are blossoming while others sport sword-sharp leaves.]

[Caption: picture 4: Yucca plants like this one near San Antonio Dam bloom only once after 10 years and then die.]

This giant fights for 10 years in dry soil before it's mature enough to flower -- just once. 

Then the yucca dies. 

"I have respect for how much energy it's putting into these blooms, said Christine Jacobs, an assistant at the Resource Conservation District in Ontario. "If you look at where they grow, in dry sparse vegetation, sometimes right out of rocks. They're meeting all the challenges and surviving." 

It seems Mother Nature, though, was kind to these plants when she dumped El Nino {[( TILDE, PLEASE)]} rains this year and more water than usual in the two prior winters. She was kind to the yucca and to its admirers, who are noticing more of the blooms this summer bursting from stalks as tall as 8 feet. 

Hundreds of white flowers hang on each stalk, which narrows at the top and bottom like the flame of a candle. 

"It seems almost luminescent. They almost do glow, even in the daylight," Jacobs said. 

She estimates there are about a third more flowers this year. 

Yucca plants live throughout the area, on Mr. Baldy, near Lytle Creek, along Interstate 15 below the Cajon Pass. 

One book of wildflowers calls the local species "Our Lord's Candle." Its official name is Yucca whipplei after A. W. Whipple, a surveyor for the Pacific Railroad to Los Angeles in 1853. 

Botanist Andrew Saunders of UC Riverside said one rainy season can't be credited for all of the yucca flowers, which regularly bloom in the spring and summer. 

A heavy crop of flowers and then seeds could have been planted 10 or more years ago. And extra rain back the could have ensured more of the seeds grew to plants just as more rain in recent years probably gave the plants extra energy to flourish earlier. 

Before it blooms, a yucca is a short bunch of sword-sharp leaves in the years before it stores enough carbohydrates to grow a long stalk and to flower. 

"It's hard to appreciate them when they're not in bloom," said Steve Morgan, curator of the UC Riverside Botanic Gardens. 

The yucca moth pollinates the plants so that they can turn into fruit in August and then into seedpods. Then the plant dies, like a salmon that swims upstream to spawn. 

"The plant goes into that stalk and it's quite spectacular," Morgan said.