Borrego Springs - Desert
Borrego Springs is the closest desert to San Diego. It is in the rain shaddow of the Mt Laguna mountain range. The small town, Borrego Springs, is in the centre of a large desert valley, and gives grand unobstructed panoramas all around. The roads are all deserted, the sky is dark blue, the earth is sand coloured rock.
I loved the place for the sense of space it gives you. You can see for miles around,
nobody else near, just you, the desert and the mountains.
Henderson Canyon Road, desert all around...
The grand sweeping panorama looking towards Clark Lake (dry)
A view of my car, a 1996 Pontiac Grand Prix
The Badlands - truely bad lands - nothing you can do with them, just a twisted mangle of hills for 20 miles all around.
The Salton Sea is another bad place. It sounds like paradise, an inland sea in the desert, but in fact it is like hell. The sea is too salty to support life, dead fish carcusses litter the sea shore, the air stinks, and all the human settlements around are cheap mobile home parks or are deserted shells - built in the 60s and never used since.
The whole area reminds me a lot of Israel, particular around the Dead Sea. The differences are that the Dead Sea is a lot nicer, you can go floating in it, it doesn't smell, the tourist infrastructure is a lot better, with a great climb up to Masada, a jewish fortress on top of a mountain, and being able to swim in the Oasis - Ein Gedi at the bottom. Borrego Springs on the other hand gives a great sense of space.
A map of Borrego Springs is shown left. There are mountain ranges to the north, west and south, with the badlands to the east. The area is completely arid, apart from citrus groves located north of Borrego Springs downtown.
Coming from San Diego, the most dramatic approach is via S22, where you descend
a few thousand feet via dramatic zig-zag roads, with grand vistas of the valley.
The alternate route is via Julian, crossing a couple of desert valleys before
descending into borrego springs from the south.