Anza-Borrego

Anza-Borrego Desert State Park is California’s largest state park, and indeed the largest state park in the US. Most of it is Mojave Desert wilderness, set aside to protect native plants and animals, among them the endangered Desert Bighorn Sheep, of which only 750 survive. Around the borders of the park are a few scattered campgrounds, mostly undeveloped.

Palm Canyon, where we’re staying, is the largest and most developed, with about a hundred sites with power and hookups for RVs. We’re surrounded on three sides by mountains, and if you like dramatic desert scenery, you would love it here.

We’ve taken a number of hikes, most notably to Palm Canyon. It’s a two-mile one way, mostly easy trek up a desert wash, and for the last half-mile or so the trail runs along an improbable stream. At trail’s end is a beautiful desert oasis with palms and ferns and little waterfalls. Only the seventy-two virgins are missing to keep it from qualifying as a genuine paradise on earth. Despite it’s being the most-used trail in the park, we met only a few other hikers along the way.

One of the pleasures of travel during the school year is, not surprisingly, the absence of children. I love children, (no I don’t), but they’re noisy, and campgrounds are usually noisy places. Nine months a year, though, it’s pretty much just retired people like us that we meet, the exception being some weekends in some parks. We stayed here a week and had reserved another, but we realized Thursday night that this was the MLK three-day weekend (thus are our national heroes reduced) and by Friday families were arriving in large numbers.

Yesterday, Saturday, we drove five miles out a dirt road recommended only for four-wheel drive vehicles, (our truck is), and then hiked up a steep and rocky trail to Wind Caves, only to discover a troop of Boy Scouts camping there. We chatted with one of the adults sitting well away from the campsite, and he said he had to get away from the noise. Said he wasn’t sure he could make it through the weekend. Mary told him she had done it for thirty years, and he just kind of groaned.

The scouts managed to mostly spoil the effect of the wind caves, naturally sculpted sandstone caves used for shelter by Native Americans for thousands of years, but it was still a great view of the badlands, and the drive in up the narrowing canyon was exciting.

We have a reservation here until Thursday, but we’re leaving tomorrow, four days early because of a forecast for a series of storms that will hit the west coast starting tomorrow. The San Diego paper says this storm will join one of the four record storms since records were begun in the 1860s, and even allowing for a lot of media weather-hype, it sounds like a good idea to clear out early. Five days of rain are forecast, maybe more, and flash floods are likely, as are high winds. We can’t travel if the wind is much above thirty miles per hour, so we’re hoping to cut out early and make it over to the LA area, where my three delightful cousins live. They’re the last and the closest of my relatives I have any contact with, and I only see them every several years.

As I write, I’m hoping we didn’t wait a day too long as the wind is coming up fast and thick clouds are gathering. With luck, the wind will back off when the rain starts tomorrow and we can make our escape, much as we did when we left Klamath Falls, now five weeks ago.

After a week with the cousins, we’re coming back this way heading for Arizona, but we’ll probably stay in Joshua Tree National Monument a little to the north. Anza-Borrega, though, will be on our list of stops in years to come. We’ve talking to several people who have been coming here for years.