Disappearing into a beautiful void

I love to tell people I’m going to the Anza Borrego desert. They never know where it is, even Californians, and it’s most of southern Cali, over the mountains east of San Diego. I’m not even sure how I found out about it. So, what with the lilting name and its complete invisibility, there’s a nice mystery to it, like I’m disappearing into a beautiful void. And to some extent that’s true. It’s a place of great desert beauty, with not much to do, not much internet or phone reception, lots of hammock-inspiring heat in the middle of the day.

There’s a town of Borrego Springs, with the state park headquarters, a library, a few stores, even fewer restaurants, mostly tilting Mexican. The place where we stay is twenty miles out of town, in Ocotillo Wells, though Ocotillo Flats would seem more appropriate. It’s a vast plain between brown, stony mountains that turn blue at the end of the day, bordering on the largest off-highway vehicle park in the country.

Much of the time, you hear nothing at all. When I took the picture of this inch-long beetle, it was so quiet I could hear the dry skittering of its minute feet on the sand. But Friday evenings and Saturday mornings are abuzz with people going off into the reserve. I seldom hear them come back, which is interesting. They apparently keep a Sabbath, because on Sundays quiet descends again, except for the shushing breeze, desultory traffic, the cooing of mourning doves, the nighttime yip of coyotes.

There is the occasional descent of military helicopters, who use this area for practice. I was once hiking in a canyon at the end of Split Mountain Road, the main Ocotillo Wells road, and a huge — certainly in that context — black helicopter came swooping in, hovered not far above us, turned, flew out.

I was pretty startled, but my companions simply said, ‘Practicing canyon flying,’ and on we went. They were showing me the two million-year-old shell and fish fossils lying casually in the sand that once was the bed of a vast sea.

Plus a tarantula nest!

The owners of our RV park have created trails around and through their acreage, and that’s our morning walk, early, before it’s too hot, especially for my black dog. There are other hikes I do alone, quieting pursuing wildflowers. I sometimes join communal hikes. One Saturday I was out with a group of fifteen photographers for eleven hours, in heat that hit 94. It was a magical time, to places I would never find, but required a full hammock day to recover.

When our family visited, I took them to the trail in the state park that leads to an actual palm oasis. The top photo below is approaching it. The one beneath it is the view from the large flat rock we all collapsed on when we got there. It was cooler on the way back because the desert cools the minute the sun disappears behind the mountains.

Anza Borrego is named after two unrelated entities, though they presumably eyed each other as they passed. Juan Francisco de Anza was an early Spanish explorer, of some note and intrepidity. Borrego is the local wild sheep, with graceful curling horns, native to this area. I don’t approve of naming places after conquistadores, and the combination is slightly ridiculous, like naming a state park in New York the Hudson White-Tailed Deer Preserve.

However, that’s all left-brain caviling. The right brain loves all those musical syllables, as well as the silence and beauty of the desert, and revels in being here.

I’d love to have you on the journey! If you add your email address, I’ll send you notices of new adventures.

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