The Days Are Different in Anza-Borrego
There
are days, and there are days, in Anza-Borrego. There are the cloudless days.
The sun is hot and the light is flat, and if you are a photographer who
prizes good light you may well want to throw your camera away, or at least
put it away until the light is better.
There are days when the sky is mostly cloudy and gray. There are days when the sky is partly cloudy and beautifully blue, the puffy white cumulus clouds riding eastward in the northern sky, on winds off the Pacific Ocean. On days like this, you can actually see how mountains create a rainshadow and make a desert, keeping the moisture away, leaving the desert with fierce, drying wind.
Then there are the days when the blossoming flowers grab your attention and you start wondering how so many different species ever got here, and how the annuals keep coming back and how the perennials survive. That may be the day you discover that this desert is full of life (plant life, insect life, animal life) and not at all the barren wasteland that deserts are sometimes thought to be.
On
other days, the geology may get your attention, especially if the light
is right. When somebody tells you that once upon a time some of Anza-Borrego's
treeless badlands were covered by a lush tropical savannah inhabited by
prehistoric animals of whom only the fossilized bones and shells remain,
you may wonder about the paleontology.
And so it goes. On a horribly windy morning you may see a hungry bird fighting a gale to get to his nest or next meal, and you may marvel that birds or other animals could survive out here. You may look around and think the same thing about Native-Americans like the Kumeyaay to the south and the Cahuilla to the north who managed to eke out a living in the desert in spite of heat, cold, and lack of convenience stores.
Or, driving your high-speed car south of Blair Valley along County Road S-2, you may stop and look down into Box Canyon and marvel at the fact that in 1847 the Mormon Battalion used hand tools to chip back the rocks so they could proceed on their journey to San Diego by way of the San Felipe Valley.
Welcome
to the mountains and badlands of Anza-Borrego. It is a wonderful mixture
of climatology, botany, zoology, geology, palentology, astronomy, and history,
waiting to be studied. It is also a place where a person can sit down or
take a simple walk, and listen to the silence, enjoy the solitude.