March 11th – March 14th, 2023
We left camp after breakfast, destination AGUA CALIENTE County Park, on the way to Anza Borego State Park, California.
We followed the Mexican border for a while up to the town of Ocotillo where we veered north on S2 road to Agua Caliente where we found a good spot at the campground, right next to a mimosa tree in full bloom and its distinctive fragrance in the air.
There we did a short nature trail hike in Moon Light Canyon, where plants were labelled and quite a few in bloom. Always a surprise to find life in the desert!
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Next day, we took a drive through Anza-Borego State Park and were told that more flowers were in bloom in Coyote Canyon. On the way we passed some metal structures of dinosaurs, mythical animals and people, their rusty appearance blending into the desert landscape.
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On our last day in the park, we explored Blair Valley.
Our first stop was Marshall South Home Site. Marshall South, an author fulfilled his dream of living in the desert by building a small homestead on top of Ghost Mountain (980m). With his wife and three children, he sought “silence and peace”. His experiment in the 1930s and 40s did not last as after battling with the harsh conditions, the family moved away. He was a pioneer of what we would call today, living off-grid but pushing it to the extreme!
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Next stop was the Morteros trail: the morteros are holes left in the stone where the native Americans prepared food or medicines by grinding seeds/ plants they collected from the desert. The repetitive motion of rock against rock creating a bowl like “mortero” . It was their natural kitchens.
Our final stop was the Pictograph trail and Smugglers Overlook. The trail meanders amongst large boulders. On one of them, you can see pictographs in reddish/ochre colour (the artist mixed hematite or red iron oxyde and the oil of roasted wild cucumber kernels to obtain that colour) or black. The colour is important, in the artists’ culture red is often a “female colour” while black is “male”. Hard to know what these symbols mean today but some of the pictographs appear to be related to a vision or spirit helper.
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