Finding Borrego - Borrego Springs, California

Finding Borrego

Most residents of Borrego Springs will tell you that the small desert village where they live is not really on the way to anywhere. There are very few trips that are planned to get you from one distant place to another that will take you through Borrego Springs. Everyone finds Borrego in their own way. And once they are here, by whatever means and for whatever reasons they find themselves here, they sense the very comfortable feeling of being at home. For many Borragans the place where they live is best described by a line in a John Denver song that says: "going home to a place we've never been before."

Borrego Springs is a special place as much for the people who are drawn to live here and the village personality that their presence creates, as it is a special place because it's an island, not a desert island in the sea but an island of land that is completely surrounded by the vast desert of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park.

On this page we offer their stories, the stories of Borregans and how they found home here.

By Mike McElhatton ABDNHA Program Director

When Christmas Circle first appeared through the dusty windshield of our ford pickup in 1976 it looked like some kind of mistake in highway planning, an unnecessarily large traffic circle in the middle of the desert.

It is a 1,500 mile drive from our home along Indian Creek on Priest Lake in far northern Idaho to Borrego Springs. Terri and I had driven from our home near the Canadian border starting the day before and then all through the night to get to our destination, Joshua Tree, as early in the day as possible. We knew we needed to get there early to find a spot in the park's campground which would have vacancy only as campers checked out early in the day. But when we arrived it was already full. A ranger suggested we “go down to Borrego.” He said that’s where he and his family went when they wanted to camp in the desert, and he mentioned that they liked a place called Pinyon Wash. So the driving continued.

The springtime desert trip had become an annual ritual for us, a ritual started just a few years earlier while attending Idaho State University in Pocatello. But our journies had always been to Arizona and this was the first trip to the California desert.

For a while we just sat on the grass at Christmas Circle and took in the surroundings. Then we walked over to the old food market that is now the Borrego Arts Institute and we picked up some carne asada to cook over the grill, a couple of blocks of ice, and some beer and other cold drinks. By now it was late afternoon so we hit the road again, for the very last leg of a very long drive.

As we left the asphalt and started bouncing our way into the wash, I recall our attention was first drawn to the smoke trees. It was as if they were there but not really there, so perfectly blended with the environment it seemed you looked right through them, well-named, because it was like looking through smoke. We bumped along, passing stands of cholla nicely backlit with the sun, and the sandy road drew us in to always see beyond the next bend, to see what else might be out there.

A mile or so into the wash we found a spot that looked like it had been waiting for us, a spot with an enormous rock at the base of a hill, with nice flat sand behind it and perfect “sitting rocks.” There was a twisted old ironwood tree for shade, as well as barrel cactus and green agaves beautifully positioned on the rocky slope above that let us know beyond any doubt that we had arrived in the desert. The tarp came off the back of the pickup, the tent went up, boxes of food were hauled to the tailgate, and before long it was moonlight that illuminated the desert floor.

We didn’t really know it at the time, but we had just found Borrego.

The day that we found Borrego was like any other normal camping trip on the day that it happened. But it evolved into something much more than that. From that very first trip, Borrego became home to us. Everyone knows what home is. It is a place where you feel welcome and at ease to be yourself, a comfortable place that speaks to you and tells you that this is your place, the place where you belong, a place that calls you to return when you are away. We already had a home of course, in Idaho, a wonderful place that gave us the same feeling as Borrego. But now we had this second home as well.

With time the annual desert trip became a migration between our two homes, one with a house and the other with just a spot in the desert with sand and rock that was ours. Before long the pickup became a family car, and the annual journey became a trip with Chris and Andy, two little boys along for the ride. In the beginning it was a long trip that involved diaper changes and car sick kids in the back seat, but later it was with two boys who grew to become desert explorers. We came to call our place in Pinyon Wash “The Rock” and it was often our base camp. It was the place where we staged Easter egg hunts, where the kids “discovered” coins we had buried in the sand, and the place where there was no better cup of morning coffee in all the world as those first rays of sunshine cast a warm blanket across the land. It was a place where Chris and Andy came to visit together one time, on their own, when they were both old enough to drive.

We go back to “The Rock” from time to time, and it is mostly unchanged from the first day of that trip in 1976. I once kicked around in the sand to see if any of those buried coins might still be there. But they are all gone. The wash has changed course after decades of desert rains, but the agaves and barrel cactus, are still on the hillside and the old tree is there as well.

Everyone finds Borrego in their own way and sometimes it takes time to know you have found it. Looking around the rock I can see footprints, and the sitting rocks have been rearranged from time to time. Many people have spent the night at this spot. It is nice to know that after almost fifty years, this spot is still at work, helping people to find Borrego.