Anza-Borrego Desert - California's Biggest State P

Thursday, November 14, 2019
Anza Borrego State Park;, California, United States
On my last California desert trip in 2009 I spent a few days in Death Valley and also drove through Joshua Tree National Park and East Mohave National Park and even camped on night on the shore of the Salton Sea. One place I didn’t get to that has been of interest is Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, the largest state park in California and one of the largest in the U.S. The park covers a large area in eastern San Diego County east of the peninsular ranges and constitutes part of the very hot, low altitude Colorado Desert.  It’s not a place to go during the hear of summer but sounds interesting in the cooler season, which is naturally still quite warm.  The climate of the area is such that it has neither the cactus varieties of the Sonoran Desert nor the unique flora of the higher Mohave. It is naturally rather barren except where there are oases around natural springs or manmade irrigation systems.
I got there via a route that took me southwest from I-10 Blythe via the Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation area and the Imperial Valley.   The latter, like the Salton Sea which it surrounds, is actually below sea level and one of the hottest places in the U.S., richly agricultural but with a very poor population, kind of like a northern extension of Mexico. There’s not much to see in the valley. Interestingly, in California as you leave the border region there’s a second level of immigration checkpoints.
Although the road seemed to travel upwards significantly from the valley to Borrego Springs, the town’s elevation is only around 500 feet, so most definitely still low desert despite the towering Santa Rosa mountains around it.  In my opinion, Anza-Borrego is big enough and varied enough to be of National Park system material, but as a state park there’s little in the way of fees except at two campgrounds. It’s one of those places someone could well spend several days, much more than the two I gave myself in the area since there are so many hiking trails.  A lot of the park, though, consists of rough unpaved four-wheel tracks that my Buick wouldn’t be able to handle.
With my limited time I picked two relatively short hikes that are considered park highlights.  One was the three-mile round trip trail into Borrego Palms Canyon to the palm oasis made possible by a natural spring. One thing I learned on this trip is that there’s only one palm tree species native to California – the California Fan Palm. This is the species you see at desert oases where the dead leaves hang down along the trunk creating the appearance of the tree wearing a skirt. Overall the vertical ascent to the palm oasis is only a few hundred feet, so it’s a quite easy hike.
A managed to get a second short hike in around mid afternoon as the sun was getting low, so maybe I didn’t experience it under the best of light.  The Slot is located a few miles down a graded dirt road and consists of a narrow slot canyon created by water erosion.  It’s similar to the more famous ones in Arizona and Utah like Antelope and Paria Canyons but neither as long nor as touristy. The trail rapidly descends from the parking area down into a ravine which quickly becomes extremely narrow, so much so that in places a broad-shouldered person like myself has to go through sideways in the narrow passages between the vertical walls.  And forget about passing someone going in the opposite direction. After a couple hundred yards the canyon widens somewhat but passes through numerous S-shaped bends before opening out into colorful eroded badlands.  It’s supposedly possible to make a three-mile loop back to the parking lot, but I was warned the trail was hard to find and it was far more scenic to just backtrack through the canyon to take in the tight squeeze views from a different direction.
There’s no direct “as the crow flies” route between Borrego Springs and the Palm Springs area because of the towering Santa Rosa Mountains, but the simplest route would be to head directly east toward Salton Sea and then northwest to the Coachella Valley.  I decided to leave on a more circuitous route that took me through more central areas of the park and then over a few mountain ranges.  The highest peak in San Diego County is Hot Springs Mountain at a reasonably impressive 6,535 feet, almost as high as the highest peaks east of the Mississippi but not as impressive as the peaks in the San Gabriels and San Bernardinos less than a hundred miles to the north. These mountains are considered to be the northernmost part of the Peninsular Ranges of Baja California, and it doesn’t take all that much climbing from the desert until you’re in open woodland and then a mix of beautiful deciduous and coniferous forest around Julian, a mountain town that’s the San Diego backcountry’s highland escape.  Although I has heard about Julian even then, I never made it there during the summer months I spent in San Diego about 30 years ago when I had the bright idea of moving there after I graduated from college. Julian’s Main Street looks like that of small mountain towns in Colorado, and it’s a landscape and climate (it snows sometimes in winter) that I think I could make home if for some reason I had to live in California. Julian is also known for its apple orchards and the bakeries along Main Street that transform the apples into dumplings and pies.
Down the mountain west of Julian, the hills and valleys of interior San Diego County are a beautiful landscape of ranches, woodlands, and some very small towns. Either most of the land enjoys some kind of protection or maybe it’s too far for practical commuting to the city less than 50 miles away.  Either way, it feels like an older version of California before the metropolitan areas became so populated.  And the skies in the area must still be dark enough at night because Mount Palomar observatory is located there.
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