Indian Valley Anza Borrego Desert State Park

My son and I went out camping for a couple of days in Indian Valley over the Thanksgiving break. We drove out the south fork and camped in a nice sandy area about a mile past the North/South split in the road. It was really windy and once the sun went down it got very cold, low 30’s easy. We built up a good fire and just hung out most of the night. It was a full moon that night and we saw a single vehicle drive up the dirt road without headlights towards Sombrero Peak and later return back and drive out of the valley. Several times throughout the night and early morning we listened to the coyotes yipping and howling to each other across the canyons. It sounded like they were in Torote Canyon howling over to the False Sombrero area.

We used the truck to block the wind, we even had to use the buckets underneath

Full moon and our fire

My son opted to sleep in the comfort of the truck bed while I slept on the ground next to the fire eager to try out my newly acquired military issue modular “sleep system”. I slept really good and stayed super warm even as it got down into the low 30’s. When I rolled up the bivy and sleeping bags I found a nice, cute little baby scorpion had bunked up with me staying warm between my bivy and sleep pad.

My new "sleep system"

My new "sleep buddy" he was underneath my sleeping bag on my Thermarest pad

I hiked around the valley while my son slept in. I found some morteros, rock carvings and what I believe to be an old Indian hunting blind.

Rock Carvings near the North/South junction

Indian hunting blind (I believe) on top of an island of boulders

View of False Sombrero from the Indian hunting blind

Small cave and morteros in Indian Valley

My son had never seen any rock art so we climbed up the boulder strewn valley to find the Solstice Cave. The cave has numerous paintings and is believed to have been used by the Indians for some type of summer/winter solstice celebrations. The Anza Borrego.net website has a great trip report about it.

My son in the Solstice Cave

One of the many pictographs in Solstice Cave

I counted 13 sun pictographs in the Solstice Cave

Collage of photos from Indian Valley

On our way out of the valley we drove up to the end of the North fork to check out the area. You can climb False Sombrero from this area or even hike over to Torote Canyon. It is mostly all boulders and sandy washes.

False Sombrero in North Indian Valley

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Anza Borrego Misc Trips

The last 3 weekends have been cold and rainy in San Diego so I decided to go out to Anza Borrego instead where it has been in the low 80's and sunny. First trip out was to Bisnaga Wash. This is a wash that flows from the Vallecito Mtns and is a potential backpack trip for me up to Whale Peak.

Entrance to Bisnaga Wash and the Vallecito Mtns in the background

Going up the wash

Looking up the "trail" towards the base of the mtns

Ocotillo

Looking back down towards highway

This is catclaw country

I also went out to Inner Pasture, this is an area just north of Canebrake and sits between Agua Caliente, Moonlight Canyon and Red Top. I don't think too many people go here, the only signs of life I saw were actually 4 sets of foot prints heading out of the canyon, illegal immigrants for sure. There were signs of illegal traffic in the wash, discarded, faded water bottles, clothing and even a 5 peso coin. There were a lot of animal tracks and scat, deer, coyote, mountain lion, etc.

Entrance to the canyon

This was about a 4' dry fall

Big Horn sheep or deer maybe

Trash bag full of clothing for the illegal traffic

Some camera filter trickery, the Sawtooth mtns are in the distance

Large concentration of mtn lion scat, the one in the middle was fresh and still had flies on it

The many morteros in the area are clues of past indian occupation

Arriving back to the truck at sunset I tried some more camera filters on the Vallecito Mtns

Moonrise over the Coyote Mtns

This was the GPS track of my hike

I went out with a friend and his wife the other day to try and find the elusive Solstice Cave. I did a lot of searching on the Internet and was only able to find vague references to it's general location. We hiked around for about 3 hours and finally Bob's wife found it while we were looking elsewhere. This cave is supposed to have some significance for the indians way back when, a ceremonial site and summer/winter solstice. Bob wrote up a nice trip report on his website AnzaBorrego.net

A collage of photos from Solstice Cave

You can see more photos of Anza Borrego here http://picasaweb.google.com/daren.sefcik