A FALL TRIP TO THE DESERT: Anza Borrego State Park, California

Anza Borrego State Park, Palm Canyon Trail

In late October, Art and I spent a weekend at Anza Borrego Desert State Park, about a three hour drive southeast of Los Angeles, the largest state park in California and one of our favorites. When I first came to California more than forty years ago, I viewed the desert as a dry barren place. Since then I’ve learned to appreciate the wide variety of wildlife that makes its home there and the amazing adaptations of the many desert plants.

Cholla cactus. When it rains, the cactus absorbs water and stores it for later use.

Most of my many trips to Anza Borrego have been in the spring--when birds are singing, winter rains fill the seasonal streams, and flowers burst into bloom everywhere. This was my first visit in the fall. In contrast, the landscape was almost uniformly brown, the steam beds were dry, and there were many fewer birds– and not many people either.

The walkway between the Visitor Center and the campground is crossed by late afternoon shadows.

We arrived on Saturday afternoon and after checking in at our hotel, the Borrego Springs Resort, we headed for the Visitor Center where we looked at the exhibits and chatted with the helpful volunteers at the desk. We then took a short walk down the paved trail leading to the campground, looking for signs of life.

A bee getting nectar from a chuparosa flower.

We startled a rabbit that scurried away through the cactus and spotted a hummingbird getting its last sips of nectar from the red chuparosa flowers before the sun went down. But otherwise, it was fairly quiet.

Beginning of the solar system walk. "If the diameter of the Sun were 36 inches, the diameter of this steel sign stand, how large would Earth be? How far away? Follow the trail and find out!

Along the walkway we passed markers giving us a vicarious tour of the solar system. Each planet is a proportional size and distance away, giving a sense of the immensity of our universe. (Earth was just a tiny dot, not even a half inch across.)

The sun rises to the east, visible between the palms planted around our hotel.

The next morning we got up early to begin our walk to Palm Canyon before it got too hot. (Even in fall, desert temperatures can be in the 90s.) After parking our car at the trail head a park volunteer gave us a map and nature guide and made sure that we had packed plenty of water for the three-mile round trip hike. Even though the morning air was still cool, it quickly became much warmer.

Although we were unlikely to see them, signs warn hikers of mountain lions and rattlesnakes.

We followed the trail up the canyon, occasionally scrambling over boulders or climbing steps to get to the next level. As we approached the oasis we began to see spots of green, telling us that there was water not far below the surface.

The California fan palm (Washingtonia filifera) is the only palm tree native to California.

At the oasis native California fan palms flourish, providing shelter and food for wildlife. Pools provide water for bighorn sheep, coyotes, rabbits, squirrels and other animals. If you are lucky you might spot the bighorn sheep (called borregos in Spanish) that live in the canyons and ledges. We saw footprints and scat, but no sheep.
After resting in the shade for a while and sipping some of our water, we headed back down to our car.

Tall rocky mountains border Anza Borrego to the north. Rain at upper elevations funnels down through the canyons.Flash floods carry boulders down from the mountain. Nooks and crannies underneath make habitat for desert wildlife.

The quiet atmosphere made the starkness of the geology even more striking and though we had to look a little harder for signs of desert wildlife, we knew it was still there.

The Verdin is a common desert bird.

Australia's Red Center: Uluru

Uluru and Kata Tjuta National Park
(My journal entry from our visit in April 1999)

Uluru, formerly known as Ayers Rock

    We have just returned from our Easter vacation trip with a week’s worth of clothes covered in fine red dust acquired in Australia’s “Red Center” where we visited Uluru (formerly known as Ayers Rock), in Uluru and Kata Tjuta National Park, and Alice Springs, the largest town in the heart of Australia’s enormous desert interior and the center of life in the outback.  In the desert, daytime temperatures can easily rise to 110 degrees or more and in winter it goes below freezing at night, but we were lucky to have beautiful weather in the seventies.  In the morning, though, it was so cold that I had to put on my thermal underwear!
A Desert Oasis

Thorny Devil Lizard

    As in most deserts, one would think that nothing could live in such a harsh environment, but we saw  a surprising variety of plant and animal life, especially near sources of water.  Actually, the land around Uluru was green and flowering due to rains several weeks ago.  This trip was also our first real exposure to Aboriginal life and we learned how people have lived and survived in this region for 70,000 years.  About half of the land in the Northern Territory belongs to the Aboriginal Land Trust, the equivalent of America’s Indian Reservations, and most of Australia’s Aborigines live in this region.     
Uluru as a Tourist Destination

Spinifex, typical grass of the Australian desert

    We flew to Uluru on Thursday, arriving about noon at our hotel in the resort village of Yulara.  Until the 1970's the only way to visit Uluru (then called Ayers Rock) was to drive there and camp or stay at a small motel, both located right at the base of the rock. (You may have seen a movie called Cry in the Dark starring Meryl Streep.  It was based on the true story of a couple camping at the rock whose baby was supposedly stolen by a dingo.)  As Uluru became an increasingly popular tourist destination (currently 400,000 people visit each year)  it was decided to move all the accommodation facilities outside the park boundary and Yulara was built.  About the same time the government was under increasing pressure from the Aborigines, who regard Uluru as a sacred site, to return the national park to them.  The Hand Back, as it is called, finally happened in 1985 with the agreement that tourists would continue to be allowed to visit.
Mingi

Sand dune with Uluru in the distance

    We didn't climb Uluru.  The Aborigines don't like having people climb it although they don't stop them. The Aborigines call the people who climb the rock Mingi, which means "ants" and that's exactly what they look like when you see them from a distance.  The more eco-minded tour companies discourage climbing Uluru.  Not only is it disrespectful for the Aborigines who consider the rock sacred but it is wearing down the rock.  In any case, Art doesn't like high places so he was easily convinced that we didn't want to climb.   We decided that we'd much more enjoy a walk around the base of the rock. 
Sunrise Walk Around the Rock

View of Uluru from walk around the base of the rock

    The next morning we got up at 5:30 to meet our tour guide for a sunrise breakfast walk around the base of the rock, a distance of about ten kilometers. This was a small group eco-tour and this time we were nearly alone to enjoy the lighting of the rock at dawn. At the same time we had the double pleasure of seeing the moon set behind the rock. 
    In the course of the walk we were introduced to desert plants, saw lots of birds (including our first sighting of zebra finches in the wild) and heard some of the aboriginal stories associated with the Rock.  We had chances to try “bush tucker” (native edible foods) including a tiny red fruit called the bush plum and the so-called bush banana, which is banana shaped but more like eating the inside of a milkweed pod.
Kata Tjuta
    Our outing the next day was a hike and sunset barbecue at Kata Tjuta, an equally impressive but less well known rocky outcrop nearby.  The Aboriginal name, Kata Tjuta, means stone heads and they do look like giant heads piled on the horizon. As we returned after dark, we saw an owl and a dingo in the headlights of the bus.  Overhead, the sky was brilliant with the moon and Southern constellations.
    On Sunday morning, after five days in the park, we flew from Ayers Rock to Alice Springs, a distance of about 300 miles.

  [We were so inspired by this visit to Uluru that we returned three years later to take more photos and to research my book Uluru: Australia’s Aboriginal Heart (Clarion, 2003.)]
Accommodations at Yulara:  On this trip we stayed at the Desert Gardens Hotel.  On our subsequent trip, when we researched my book, we stayed at the Emu Walk Apartments.