Anza-Borrego Desert State Park — The Borrego Springs Drive

Welcome to Anza-Borrego Desert State Park — the largest state park in all of California. I'm Ranger Quinn, and I'll be your guide at the wheel from here. From time to time I'll hand things off to Ranger Boone, who tel…

Notice how the air just changed. A minute ago you had pinyon and juniper crowding the shoulders, that high cool green-gray you get above four thousand feet. Now the trees are thinning, dropping behind you switchback b…

Feel the road working here, the way each switchback throws you one direction and then reels you back the other. Engineers had to fold this grade against itself to lose all that elevation gently. Down to your right the…

Watch the plants change as you lose altitude. The brushy mountain cover gives way, and out across these lower slopes a new resident takes over, low and gray-green and evenly spaced, almost planted-looking. That's creo…

You can feel it now, can't you. That dry warmth rising up the grade to meet the car, thickening with every hundred feet you drop. This is low desert, and even in the cool months it has a weight to the air that the mou…

Look at the bones of this place. As the slope opens up you can read the geology plain as a diagram, layered cliffs and washed-out ridges, the whole hillside carved by water that mostly isn't here anymore. This valley…

Listen, if you can, under the engine. The mountain quiet is giving way to desert quiet, which is a different and bigger silence, the kind that has a whole open valley folded into it. You're near the bottom of the grad…

Here's the center of it all — Christmas Circle, a green grassy roundabout where every road in the Borrego Valley meets. Take a beat to appreciate how strange and wonderful this place is: Borrego Springs is a town enti…

Out to the south now, watch those ridges start to rise, eroded and bare and the color of old paper, ribbed like something the rain has been carving for ten thousand years. That's the badlands beginning, mudstone hills…

On your left, that ragged heap of rocks sitting alone in the creosote is the Pegleg Smith Monument. It doesn't look like much. It isn't supposed to. There's a worn sign here that invites every passerby to add ten ston…

Boone Merrick here. Now, I've told a lot of stories that stretch the truth a little. This one was stretched by a professional, so settle in. His name was Thomas Smith, born 1801, though nobody west of the Rockies ever…

Roll your window down a finger's width and let the desert in. Out here on the seaway flats the creosote runs to the horizon, and rising up among it stand the ocotillo, those tall spidery wands clawing at the sky, leaf…

This is the turnoff for Font's Point, and people call what's out there the Grand Canyon of the desert. I want to be straight with you, because the road sheet is blunt about it: the overlook itself sits four miles sout…

Look hard at that hillside and you might miss the building entirely, which is exactly the point. The Anza-Borrego visitor center is built right into the slope, bermed over with desert earth and a living sod roof, so i…

Well now. Settle in, because this one's about the oldest deal in this desert, the one between water, fire, and a tree that's tougher than it looks. The palm you walked up to see has a proper name, Washingtonia filifer…

Stop here and just take it in. Below you and ahead, the first palm grove, a stand of California fan palms holding their ground in a fold of bare stone. You can read the fire in them, the blackened trunks, the gaps whe…

This is the headline of the whole tour, so let's do it right. Pull into the trailhead lot here at the top of the campground road. There's a ten-dollar day-use fee, and that same ticket covers your walk. Now, before yo…

There it is. A three-hundred-and-fifty-foot serpent, a sea-dragon, rising out of the desert floor in great rusted humps, diving under the road beneath your wheels, then surging back up out of the sand on the other sid…

Boone here. Now, I want to tell you how these metal creatures came to be standing out in the open desert, and then I want to tell you the thing almost nobody mentions, which is the part that'll keep you up tonight. T…

Ease off the gas and let your eyes wander the flats along Henderson Canyon Road, because this is the densest gathering of them all. They call it the Sky Art, and right about here the desert turns into a menagerie. Off…

Keep half an eye on the desert off to the sides through here, because the flats have surprises in them. This is Galleta Meadows, the open ground where the steel sky-art creatures roam, and you may catch a metal beast…

This is where the pavement ends and Coyote Canyon begins, climbing away to the north into the mountains. It looks like a road to nowhere. It is, in fact, one of the most important roads in the history of California. T…

Boone again. Roll your window down if you can, and look up that canyon, because I want you standing in the right year. Not this one. The winter of seventeen seventy-five. It's late October when Juan Bautista de Anza…

Out across the valley floor here, the cholla take over the foreground, those low knee-high cactus that catch the light and seem to glow with their own soft fur, though that fur is all needle and you'll want to admire…

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. N…

Feel the road tilt up again, gently. You're leaving the open valley floor behind and the pavement is starting to climb toward Yaqui Pass and the south country beyond it. As you rise, look how the spacing of the brittl…

Boone here. The sun's going down behind the Vallecitos, and that's the right hour for this one, so let me tell it the way the old desert hands tell it — and I'll tell you up front, this is folklore. Stories travelers…

Welcome to Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. I'm Ranger Quinn, and I'll be steering you through it from right here in the passenger seat. Now and again I'll pass you over to Ranger Boone — he's the one who spins the tal…

Notice the light out here, the way it lies long and gold across the desert when the sun gets low, picking out every ridge and ocotillo wand in sharp relief and throwing the washes into shadow. The desert keeps its bes…

Pull in here at Tamarisk Grove — this is our stop, the shady hub of the south country, tucked right at the junction of the S-3 and Yaqui Pass Road. After all that open sun, those tall tamarisk trees feel like a differ…

Here it is — Yaqui Well. Stand a second and just look at what water does. All around us, the desert is spare and pale and thorned. But right here, where a hidden seep pushes groundwater up to the surface, the ground e…