I had the pleasure of leading a group of WBC participants on a soggy weekend jaunt through Blair Valley and Little Blair Valley and all the wonders it contains.  It rained almost constantly.  This bodes well for the upcoming desert wildflower season  and I am looking forward to the explosion of color that will mark the start of spring.  This weekend featured spectacular colors of a different nature.  The rainbows were out in force as the rain and the sun battled for superiority.

We car camped in a shallow canyon, that ended up funneling the early morning wind, making for a raucous wake up call for my students.  We hiked into Smugglers Canyon to visit the Pictograph rock, that is an easy very accessible hike for most everyone.  Located a relatively flat mile into the canyon,  this large boulder decorated with red and yellow pictographs makes for a grand lunch stop.  Unfortunately this weekend the rain made it rough to stop for too long.  As I was pondering this boulder and the secrets it contains for the umpteenth time,  I came to a realization.   In my travels to Europe and other places where their long history is recorded in the architecture, I often bemoan the lack of this sort of historical record in my native city of San Diego.  While we do have a past, one that is on display in places such as the Mission, Presidio Park, and Old Town,  it is relatively new; sparse and fragmented. We are often isolated from it in our daily lives.  What I realized when I was looking at this rock,  is the ancient history that I have admired in cities such as Paris is here. It is just not written in building. It is written in the rocks; the places where the people who shaped our region lived breathed and died.  They are not the people from whom I am descended, but they are the people who recorded the past in the place I call my home.

After stopping at the Pictograph rock,  we continued on through Smugglers Canyon to the dry waterfall that provided a spectacular view of the southern portion the Anza Borrego Desert.  We were a bit concerned as to the volume of rain,  and joked as to whether the dry wash we were walking in was going to become a river again.  Fortunately this wash is very wide,  and the walls provide easy escape routes if this were ever a problem. The View as always was fantastic.  We rounded out our Saturday with a trip to a mortero site, and a nice sunset on an overlook just down from these morteros.

After a windy night, we concluded our trip with a hike up Ghost Mountain, and visited the rapidly crumbling remains of the the Marshal South cabin site he dubbed “Yaquitepec“.  Marchall South and his family lived on the isolated, inaccessible Ghost Mountian without the benefit of any modern conveniences from 1932 through the 1940s.  His Thoreau like desert experiment which he documented in a monthly columns in Desert Magazine brings another piece of the rich history of the desert that so many perceive as a barren dead landscape.