Anza-Borrego Desert State Park California

Centered in the arid Borrego Badlands due east of the Visitors Center between County Road S-22 and Route 78, four million years of geologic and paleontologic history are exhibited across a stark desert landscape. Conglomerates, sandstones, claystones and mudstones, compressed and hardened, chronicle a variety of landscapes, fossil life forms and climates that no longer exist at Anza-Borrego.

More than 200 years ago, the Spanish explorer Juan Baustista de Anza passed Font's Point leading a band of men, women and mules northward to Monterey, California. The path he forged through the desert followed San Felipe Wash. Father Pedro Font, who served as official chaplain, diarist and observer on Anza's expeditions of 1775-76, described this vantage point of the Borrego Badlands later named for him as the "sweepings of the earth."

Click on the picture for a quick video trip to Font's Point.

Font's Point may be the best place in North America to view sediments of the Pliocene and Pleistocene Epochs. But the visitor has to stretch their imagination to visualize a landscape devoid of cacti, Ocotillo and Creosote Bush. During the Pliocene Epoch, (1.6-5 million years ago), Anza-Borrego was located south of the border as a receiving basin for the ancestral Colorado River while it carved out the Grand Canyon.

To the east, where the land slopes downward, the placid inland pool of the Salton Sea, 235-feet below sea level, occupies the lowest portion of the geologically young Salton Trough, down-dropped by faulting that is separating Baja from mainland Mexico. To the west, the granitic San Ysidro Mountains rise above the Anza-Borrego Desert. To the north, Clark's Dry Lake contrasts with smaller Coyote Mountain and the 8,000-foot Santa Rosa Mountains.

Earlier, delta-marine waters of the northern Gulf of California covered the area. Where the river met the sea, organic deposits were overlain by shallow ponds, lake bogs and flood plain deposits, as local mountains were uplifted. Piled on top of one another, these sedimentary layers contain a sample of some of the most spectacular land mammals that ever lived.

These days, the Colorado River has migrated east; gone from the area are the beaches and reefs, camels, horses, cheetahs, bears and ground sloths. Many of these creatures are now extinct altogether.

Now, all that remains is arid rocky geography, sunken mesas and corrugated hills of dry mud. The forces of erosion gently soften contour lines through wind, rain and generations of flash flooding. Thousands of acres of sedimentary rock contain enough side canyons and dry washes for a lifetime of adventurous exploring.

Font's Point Quicktime VR offers a 360-degree panorama of the northern half of Anza-Borrego Desert. On the southern horizon stretch the Fish Creek, Vallecito and Pinyon Mountains, guardians of the Carrizo Corridor. In the middle distance, the twin buttes of Borrego Mountain loom. In the foreground, the bleakness of San Felipe Wash, Sleepy Hollow and Borrego Sink dominate the desertscape.