Out There in theAnza-Borrego Desert
Fog on the mountain roads, ocotillo in bloom and a freezing night under the stars in California’s largest state park.
I left Los Angeles in the rain, and when I passed through winding roads of Escondido, I was in Mission Country: great fertile pastures and horses and tiled Spanish churches. After a town of horse-drawn carriages and children playing in the street, the rain grew thicker.
As I rounded a cliff, I saw two bulls fighting on a plateau; and this was a thoroughly stunning scene. But I was getting concerned; the rain was creating a fog as I drove higher into the mountains. Soon, the fog grew to a visibility of 50 feet. Headlights at 70, and on this narrow winding road, this means extreme caution; and so for almost two hours I crept along at 10 miles per hour.
The Bloom of 1998
In 1998, El Niño rains padded the Southwest's deserts with moist, fertile sands in an almost scientifically perfect pattern. 3 inches in mid-January. An inch in late January, an inch in February and a slight patter in March. I like to describe the desert as timeless, and barren. Take its sand in the palm of your hand and sift through it — nothing there but sand.
But for a brief moment in the Spring of 1998, that strange event happened in full; California, Arizona and Utah's plains were covered in a carpet of red and yellow and purple and orange and blue wildflowers. Take your hand and look at that sand, it is really filled with wildflower seeds.
And so this year, I planned my travel around this occurrence; Joshua Tree in March, Death Valley in April, Tucson in May, and so on and so forth. But La Niña, El Niño's ugly cousin, meant no rain in 1999, and no flowers, so the thought of these clouds reaching into the heart of the Anza-Borrego Basin meant tomorrow morning's yield would be exquisite.
The last turn around the last foggy cliff and — boom — sunshine; the basin was glowing in a late afternoon light. I guess that's why it is a desert — the rain never quite makes it there. The Anza-Borrego Desert State Park is California's largest and least recognized: some 600,000 acres of dirt roads and flat horizons. It is named after a man and a sheep. The man is Juan Bautista de Anza, the Spanish captain who led some 240 colonists up Coyote Canyon, on the park's northern edge, in December 1775, on their way to found San Francisco. The sheep is the borrego, the desert bighorn, which still picks its way along the rocky slopes above the washes, though fewer than 400 of these Peninsular bighorn were left when they were listed as endangered last spring. Long before Anza, this was Kumeyaay and Cahuilla country, and the park holds thousands of their old sites: rock paintings, bedrock mortars worn into the boulders by generations of grinding, and pits where agave hearts were roasted.
I entered through a canyon not quite knowing what to expect. First, the road cut alongside the San Felipe Creek, and then widened into a vast basin, with mountains rising toward 8,000 feet on either side. Catclaw and creosote, and barrel cactus and jumping cholla. One shrub, the spidery ocotillo, was in full red bloom. I crossed some of the paved roads of Anza; back and forth and onto dry wash roads; crisscrossing as much territory as I could, until I parked alongside a cliff and climbed it; slowly and carefully as it was lined with sharp plants and unstable rocks.
I continued by foot along a promontory and spent the evening looking out over a vast expanse of fishhook cactus and brittlebush — the Yaqui Pass. When the sun dropped, I made my way down the cliffs and on the road again.
Somewhere past the pass lie the Borrego Badlands, a maze of eroded mud hills where the ground is a layer cake of old lake beds and river sands. Out there, people have dug up the bones of mammoths, camels, horses, saber-toothed cats and giant ground sloths, some six million years of animals that lived here when this basin was wetter and green. The best view into them is from Font’s Point, named for Pedro Font, the priest who kept the diary of Anza’s expedition.
Abandoned gas station along the Salton Sea, a lake that exists only because of a botched Colorado River project.
A Ranger Named Brady
The Ranger's shack was a beaten, dusty office under a Tamarisk Grove. His name was, suitably, Brady. I issued my announcement that I would be camping backcountry, and,
"Can you tell me about the roads here?"
He said, "Do you have four wheel drive."
"Yes."
"Take a seat," he said and poured two glasses of water. He described the farthest off roads, leading to lightly travelled slot canyons and hollows and dry creek beds, and,
"What is this big square here?" I said, pointing to real estate adjacent to the park. "That was a federal bomb site."
"What's it like there?"
"Oh it's wonderful. Red rock, canyons, rivers."
"So you've been there."
"Well, No, I've seen pictures. No one is allowed in there."
"Then how'd you see the pictures?"
"A ranger patrols the area. I met him."
And what about this road and that road and when I said thanks for the help, he kept talking. As I inched for the door, he noticed and said, "Sorry, man, I haven't talked to anybody all day." So I gave him yesterday's Los Angeles Times and my business card; "If you ever go to the federal site, give me a call, I'm interested."
In the dark, I drove along a sand wash, up a mild slope under the Creosote and looked for a spot to pitch camp. It wasn't easy, because the desert camper's worst nightmare is the unlikelihood of rain.
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 by 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.
The Salton Sea
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 tilapia — swimming sideways, hearts pumping, gasping for oxygen, dying.
The Salton Sea was an accident — in 1905, the Colorado River broke through a botched irrigation canal and poured into this basin for two years, filling what became California's largest lake. The state stocked it with corvina and other ocean fish for anglers, tilapia escaped from the fish farms and took over, and 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.
Since Then
I made this trip in the winter of 1999. A few things have changed since.
The park has grown to about 640,000 acres, and the bighorn are slowly coming back; recent counts put the Peninsular bighorn at more than 700. In the spring of 2017, a superbloom carpeted the Borrego Valley the way I had hoped it would that year, and drew crowds the park had never seen. Borrego Springs became an International Dark Sky Community in 2009, and the park became a Dark Sky Park in 2018.
The “federal bomb site” Brady showed me on the map is the Carrizo Impact Area, some 45 square miles that the Navy used as a bombing range from 1942 to 1959. Most of it lies inside the park, and it is still closed, because unexploded bombs keep working their way to the surface.
A few months after my trip, in August 1999, 7.6 million fish died in the Salton Sea in a single day. Under a 2003 water deal, the sea received extra water through 2017; since then it has been shrinking fast, leaving miles of exposed lakebed whose dust blows across the Imperial and Coachella valleys. The sport fishery is gone. Tilapia hang on, and the endangered desert pupfish is the last native fish left.