Photographing the Anza Borrego CA State Park

Borrego Badlands from Font's Point
Borrego Badlands from Font’s Point

Anza Borrego State Park is California’s largest.  It is located south and west of Palm Springs and east of Julian.  There are many different areas to explore.  Mary and I went to a few popular locations.  Here is what we saw:

One of the most interesting things we saw was the Pumpkin Patch.  It is not easy to get to.  You have to take a four-wheel drive and high clearance vehicle down a 10 mile long wash.  It was surprising to see a very clean toilet and picnic area in the middle of nowhere.

1403_PSA_Anza_166-Edit
1403_PSA_Anza_032-Edit

Remember to shoot both color and black and white as well as landscape and portrait orientation.  The “pumpkins” are only 6-12 inches high so getting low with a wide-angle lens works well here.

Our second favorite spot was Font’s Point which is just 15 minutes outside the town of Borrego Springs.  The road is unpaved, but much better than the Pumpkin Patch wash and can be reached in a standard car.  You are about a 1,000 feet up and have an unobstructed view to the Salton Sea 25 miles east and the surrounding mountains.  This can be both a sunrise and sunset shoot.

1403_PSA_Anza_044-Edit-Edit-Edit

Finally, there is plenty of cactus to photograph.  There are various “gardens” and springs in the Park that also include palms of various sorts.  Go to the visitors’ center in the town of Borrego Springs to find the best current blooms.

1403_PSA_Anza_062
1403_PSA_Anza_055
Watch out for the “jumping” Cholla. This is a really nasty cactus
1403_PSA_Anza_065
Mason Valley Cactus Garden
1403_PSA_Anza_190-Edit

There are many more areas to explore.  We used Bob Hitchman’s Newsletter.  The town of Borrego Springs has several nice resorts and lots of hotel rooms.  We stayed at the historic Casa del Zoro and had a great time.

See last week’s blog about photographing the moon rise at Font’s Point in Anza Borrego.

Go to www.pamphotography.com to see (and buy) our photos.

3 Comments

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s