books - Desert Magazine of the Southwest

W Desert's
Summer Place
Cool, Blue Mountains Beckon
by BILL JENNINGS
• S SPRING SIZZLES into summer, the
flfc low desert ceases to be a popular
f| camping and off-roading area for
most of its fair weather friends, and
thoughts turn to the cool, blue mountains
above.
At California's Anza-Borrego Desert
State Park, however, you can extend the
season through the hottest months because
the huge (more than 500,000
acres) park runs up to 6,000 feet in the
San Ysidro and Santa Rosa Mountains
and on the eastern edges of the
Cuyamaca and Laguna Mountains.
About three years ago, the state parks
agency began a series of land acquisition
moves with private land owners and
other public bodies, mainly the U.S.
Bureau of Land Management, that
should, someday, cause a hyphenation
and further elongation of the park's already
jaw-breaking name, to the Anza-
Borrego Desert-Mountain State Park.
Anza-Borrego has its own longtime
mountain empire, the Culp Valley, its
adjoining Jasper Trail and the juniperyucca
wonderland of Pinyon Mountain.
Now it has added the desert rim escarpment
between Julian and Mt. Laguna
and most particularly the northern
Sheep Canyon Natural Preserve and the
vast Santa Rosa Mountains State
Wilderness.
Much of these latter areas along upper
Coyote Canyon and easterly into
Rockhouse Valley are roadless, however,
and access is controlled during summer
to protect the desert bighorn sheep.
Culp Valley, a primitive campgrounds,
however, remains open all year and is
the springboard to the vast recreational
Above: Los Coyotes Indian Reservation near Warner Springs in San Diego County
offers a good summertime jeeping area for desert denizens. Right: Old homesite at
the abandoned Indian village of San Ignacio in the San Ysidro Mountains shows two
building styles and eras. Addition at left is from World War II Navy dependents'
housing project near San Diego. Original adobe at right is probably 100 years old.
Desert/ May 1977