Anza-Borrego State Park

A GORP Content Partner Adapted from California Deserts by Jerry Schad

There are many paradoxical aspects to California's Anza-Borrego State Park. It is the largest state park in California (and one of the largest in the nation, to boot), yet many of California's residents have never heard of it. The park encompasses some of the bleakest parts of the Colorado Desert; yet hidden within at least a dozen secluded canyons, water gurgles over stone and graceful fan palms sway and shimmer in the warm breeze. Broad, monotonous plains dotted with the usual low-desert shrubs are common here, but so too are fantastic sandstone formations, boulder-frosted hills, mountain ranges topped by cool "islands" of pinyon pines, and desolate badlands shot through with twisting caverns.

Juan Bautista de Anza passed this way in 1774 in search of a land route from Sonora, Mexico, to Spanish settlements along the California coast. Seventy-five years later, starting in 1849, the Gold Rush brought a steady stream of west and northbound traffic across this desert on the only all-weather overland road across the continent—the Southern Emigrant Trail. From 1858 to 1861 the famed Butterfield Overland Stage ran a mail and passenger service over the same route.

Long regarded by travelers as merely the last dry stretch short of the green and golden coastal valleys, this slice of the Colorado Desert acquired a distinction all its own in 1933 with the establishment of California's first desert state park. Named Anza-Borrego in honor of the Spanish explorer Anza and the rare desert bighorn sheep (borrego is the Spanish word for sheep), the park has today grown to include about 600,000 acres of varied desert terrain, much of it still as primitive as when Anza first saw it.

The view through a sedan's windshield will do some justice to the open panoramas of Anza-Borrego, but visitors must leave the paved roads to appreciate the park's more intimate scenery. By four-wheel-drive vehicle you can meander down trench-like mudstone gorges, some flanked by cliffs over a hundred feet high, or penetrate secluded valleys tucked amid the spurs of mile-high mountains. On foot you can poke into granite-walled canyons with no tracks save those of bighorn sheep and mountain lion. With a sturdy pair of hiking boots and a well-stocked pack, you can scramble up peaks offering fifty-mile-wide vistas of mountains and desert unsullied by any visible sign of civilization.

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In terms of scenery, facilities, and sheer size, Anza-Borrego compares well with many national parks. Visitors can explore about one hundred miles of paved, scenic highway, as well as more than five hundred miles of unpaved roads. Facilities include two developed campgrounds, ten primitive campgrounds, and a superb visitor center near Borrego Springs in the north-central section of the park. Anza-Borrego also has a policy, unique among California state parks, of allowing open camping on nearly all lands under its jurisdiction—subject, of course, to certain rules.

This brief narrative fails to touch upon dozens of other points of interest—some easy to reach, others not—equally worthy of attention in the Anza-Borrego area. Similarly a park brochure declines to list all the points of interest, with the comment that not all of them have been discovered yet. If this is true for a relatively small outlying sliver of California's great desert spaces, how much more lies in wait for future discovery elsewhere?

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