Blair Valley - Ghost Mtn - Palm Canyon

I experienced the magic of the Anza Borrego desert last Saturday. I got up at 4:15 am and was on the road by 5:30 am. As you see in the first picture, I watched the sunrise over Lake Henshaw through the shroud of clouds on the east end of the base of Palomar Mountain, One of the gateways into the Anza Borrego arriving from the west. The forcast for the mountains and coast was clouds, drizzle, and showers. I drove through the clouds and dropped in to the sunny and very windy desert. It was a most beautiful scene as the clouds formed along the top of the eastern escarpment of the San Diego mountains as I drove south to Blair Valley.
I succeeded in hiking to 4 destinations around Blair Valley:

1: The top of Ghost Mountain to the ruins on the Marshall South Cabin - on a flat just below the top of the mountain. The skeletal remains of the house, known as Yaquitepec, still stand — a rusted bed frame, the base of a large adobe oven, the frame for an arched doorway, and the many cement and barrel cisterns that once caught the seasonal rainfall, the only water available other than what was hauled up the trail. Here is where poet, author and artist Marshal South and his family lived from 1930 to 1947, pursuing a primitive and natural lifestyle - I have to say the view from the cabin area was beautiful. I can see why they chose this spot to live.

2: An ancient Kumeyaay Indian village site where the Indians lived during the winter months for at least a thousand years or more. Their morteros are abundant there. I had a lot of fun scrambling around the many giant boulders in that area.

3: The Kumeyaay Indian Pictographs. These are the first Pictographs that I have seen. I can only wonder what they mean.

4: Smuggler Canyon Overlook - To the lip of a dry fall overlooking across the desert to the eastern escarpment of the Laguna Mountains.

After a good 6 miles of exploring the Blair valley area. I drove over to Borrego Springs and went for a hike as far up Palm canyon as I could allowing enough time to get back down to the desert floor by dark. All in all I hiked around 13 miles through some of the most beautiful desert landscape around.

Anza Borrego Palm Canyon

I teamed up with Ron and Robie and set out for an adventure to the Anza Borrego Desert. We hiked across the desert from the visitor center and then several miles up into Borrego Palm canyon. This was one of the most beautiful days I have had in the wilderness. Weather conditions were perfect, The grand desert flower bloom was at it's peak, The open space, The solitude. I was really feeling the magic of the desert. Although the creek goes underground once it reaches the desert floor it was flowing very nicely up in the canyon. There were lots of nice small waterfalls and groves of palm trees. We seen lots of lizards and frogs and we even got to see some bighorn sheep up on the slopes of the canyon, one big male ram and four females. This was my first time seeing these animals in the wild. During the journey to and from the desert we drive through miles of rolling hills, grasslands and pastures with lots of cattle grazing. That area had huge fields of golden and purple flowers. We were all pretty mindblown about the whole day.