Trip to Anza Borrego State Park

 In mid March we took a break from the rain here on the Mendocino Coast and traveled down south to Anza Borrego state park south of the Palm Springs area. We've been there before when we used to do a March Art Fair in La Quinta near Palm Springs and we always enjoyed our time there. On our trip south it rained, often intensely, and a lot all the way until we reached the Santa Barbara area. Being in that area brought back memories as we lived in the Ventura/Ojai area for a number of years 40 years ago.

The first day in Anza Borrego was a little bit of a shock since it was 30 degrees warmer there than at home. We hiked up canyons and across hills each day of our stay and enjoyed the cactus and wild flowers in great profusion. We had recently purchased a new set of binoculars that in addition to letting us see big horn sheep up on the mountain tops were able to focus close so that we could stand up and look at flowers and insects with them and it was like looking at them with a very high powered magnifying glass. We could actually see

them better than we could see them if we got on our knees and got our eyes close to them. It was exciting. We ran into a great swarm of caterpillars in one area, thousands of them, eating plants and flowers with great gusto. Every few years this seems to happen, sometimes locals said there are so many on the highways that the roads become slippery and dangerous after many have been run over and the surface becomes slimy. Although we didn't see them, we heard tales of a specie of hawk that feed on the caterpillars in great numbers.

To the  right are some of the fascinating welded steel sculptures scattered in the desert around the town of Borrego Springs created by Ricardo Breceda. The amount of work that have gone into some of them is amazing. I always love rust.
To see more of his work go to his WEBSITE
A couple of times in the last year we have found really sweet places to stay on our travels through AirBnB. Just outside Borrego Springs we stayed in this great little house with everything we needed to be comfortable, jack rabbits and humming birds in the yard and less than the cost of any of the local motels.