Travel Photography > Desert Southwest > Anza Borrego Desert

If it were just an inch or so, this whole mountainside could turn into a muddy raging river; and take any tent a mile into the basin. Rule #1, they say, camp where you are immune to the wash, and so I did. With hat and gloves in this 20 degree weather, I ate bread and cheese and bananas on the jeep rooftop.

Since there wasn't a single campfire, flashlight or streetlight within any foreseeable distance, the winter night sky was brilliant. Thank god for all those summers in Bearpaw with a planetologist-to-be and a rocket scientist, because at least I had some faint, faint, faint understanding of what was going on up there.

When the cold got to me, I sat in my car for 3 hours, replaying Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds songs. I thought: On the travel channel, the show host always gets tangled up in exciting scenarios and faces strange odds. For me, the reality is different. The more monotonous, the more predictable, the better I am abiding to my travel plans. And so, I sat there in complete silence. Fumbled with my water bottle. Got out of car and threw rocks. Picked sticks off the ground.

I woke at 5:15, angry for having slept in. I broke camp, and was off to my next location, a strip of below sea-level canyon land that was connected to the largest continuous segment of below-sea level land in the western hemisphere; The Salton Sea. We visited the Salton Sea in late 1998. It was a simple location scout, but I didn't know what I was going to get into. From the car, we raced to the edge of the water.

Lily stopped when the strange smell got to her. I kept going while I watched the soupy water splash against the beachside like oil. The beach went - crunch, crunch, crunch. Soon, I realized the entire beach wasn't sand, but the bones of dead fish. And in the water; algae and hundreds of dying Nile Perch - swimming sideways, hearts pumping, gasping for oxygen, dying.

The Salton Sea was an accident - a botched Colorado River damning project filled California's largest lake in the late 1800's. Farmers filled it with Nile Perch and other fish to eat the algae; rare birds made it home. Losers moved here and claimed it a new eden. Then the reality of environments came, and the algae took the fish by the throat, and now the sea is dying, with Mr. Sonny Bono fighting for its resurrection to his last day. The Salton Sea was eerie; still. You could drop a pin, and it would probably echo.

Here in the Anza basin, that same weirdness overcame me; the haze, the stillness, the ocotillo bobbing in the wind. My last location was a burnt forest along a desert marsh section of the San Felipe, just west of the Park. Soon, I was driving down the foothills, and through miles of Orange groves and barbed wire fences, and finally, to the overcrowded coast.

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