Desert California: From Anza-Borrego to the Salton Sea

Continued from
A Grand Olde Tyme in Julian
and
Whiling Away at Lake Cuyamaca

Heading home from apple country last weekend, we decided to take the long way home.  The very long way, through several counties…and the most southerly swath of wild desert in California.

Leaving the apple/wine/Gold Rush town of Julian in San Diego County late Sunday morning, we took the 78 East straight out of town and into, for our first time, the mountainous heart of the Anza-Borrego Desert.

The largest state park in California and the second-largest state park in America, the Anza-Borrego (technically part of the Colorado Desert) is an astounding 600,000 acres, with 500 miles of roads to explore.

We found the landscape here a surprising mix of the whole Southwest: The sand and cacti of Arizona; the slot canyons, rocky crags and yawning vistas of Utah; the river washes and soft, frilly trees of New Mexico.  At first glance, the color palette runs the gamut from beige to gray, but look again and you’ll see lavender, mauve, mustard, leaf green and pink.

In early Spring, any arable land in the Anza-Borrego is generally dotted with a spectacular display of wildflowers; a chance to see this show is what long ago sparked my interest in this area, but this year, yet another March passed…and we went to Brooklyn, instead.  Now that it’s Autumn, most of the flowering desert shrubs have burnished to a golden yellow or copper red.

We took an adventurous left at the sign for the resort town of Borrego Springs, heading further up into the mountains (on a road so smooth you could take it in roller skates) for a visit to the Borrego Desert Nature Center.  The exhibits and film here concisely illustrate the region’s vast array of plants and animals, as well as its ancient incarnation as the ocean floor.

Just outside the Center’s parking lot, we took a right on S22. The 22 climbs into a rocky moonscape that winds through gaping valley overlooks and tumbled fields of massive boulders and scrub.  Looping back to the 78 East, we repeated a 15-minute stretch of our previous path; keeping to the 78 East, we passed from San Diego County into Imperial County.

Coasting through the tumbleweed town of Brawley and picking up Highway 111 North, we soon became bored by the straight, yawning road and raced alongside a desert-endless train.

By now, Toby the Corgi looked a little green around the gills, so we pulled off at a scruffy sign for Finney Lake. A dusty, deserted spot hemmed in at its core by a chain-link fence, the park is ominously peppered with spent shotgun shells and the lake water is brown.  This didn’t stop our adventurous pooch, though; after hesitating a moment on the well-worn dock beside a boat slip rimmed with algae and duck feathers, he launched himself into the lake again and again.

Impressive for a dog with four-inch legs…but not real romantic when you have to drive home with him.

Within a half-hour, the 111 veered west past Imperial County’s star attraction, a strange and shrinking geological anomaly known as the Salton Sea.  A dreamy, salty shimmer that floats in a mountain-rimmed sea of sand, the Salton is home to over 400 species of (protected) birds; driving the length of its eastern shore, we saw huge flocks of egrets, herons and pelicans landing and taking off into the blue.

The whole area offers a taste of a post-apocalyptic lifestyle…like Mad Max by the shore. In a place where breeze, gas and fresh water are hard-won commodities, abandoned Mid-Century resort communities molder under a skin of grafitti and broken glass, and weekend-warrior bikers prowl the highway like a metal army without a war.

Though it still looks deep and wide, the water here used to fill much of this valley sinkhole; in the 100+ years since its basin was filled by the then-flooding Colorado River, the Sea has been consistently evaporating in an increasingly salty brine of agricultural runoff, selenium and algal blooms.  Amidst long periods of drought, political squabbling and dwindling funds for preservation, the precarious state of the Salton Sea could well serve as a fable for the future of Southern California itself.

In other words, go see as much of it you can before it’s all gone.

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NOTE: The above stretch of our journey took about 4 hours.  Just after the Salton Sea, we passed the agricultural town of Mecca (all date palms and chalky mountains), and at the town of Indio, hit Riverside County and the 10 West.  From here it would be another 2 hours (with outlet mall/casino traffic) to our home in the San Fernando Valley.  After passing through the Coachella Valley and the resort town of Palm Springs, we crossed the south tip of San Bernardino County and into Los Angeles County.

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