Ice-Age Safari — South Sculptures

Out across the flat to your side, the megafauna are grazing. A Columbian mammoth stands tall on the open ground, tusks curving up — a real animal, fourteen feet at the shoulder, that walked this valley in the flesh. Near it, a herd of extinct horses and long-necked camels strides mid-step, frozen in rusted steel, and a pair of sabertooth cats prowls the edge of the scene. This is the southern edge of Galleta Meadows, Ricardo Breceda's open-air menagerie, and it's no fantasy. When this desert was wetter — a green grassland watered by an inland sea — these were the creatures that roamed it. Picture an Ice-Age safari right here on the valley floor: camels and horses native to North America, mammoths the size of a moving van, cats with seven-inch fangs. Their actual bones still erode out of the badlands a few miles east. The artist didn't invent these beasts. He rebuilt them from the ground they're standing on. Keep rolling south toward Yaqui Pass — Borrego Springs is behind us now.