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There’s a place near the tiny desert community of Borrego Springs where the journey of imagination between past and present is very short.
Little has changed here except the passage of time since the birth of the first European child in the new frontier of California on a foggy and chilly Christmas Eve more than 200 years ago.
Hikers are most aware of an obscure little First Child Monument marking the location where the 1775 Anza Expedition paused briefly. To me it’s almost a mystical place representing the birth of a great state.
Here in Coyote Canyon the party of 240 soldiers and settlers halted their 1,200-mile journey to “New Spain” while Maria Gertrudis Rivas gave birth to Salvador Ignacio Linares.
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This is the April 22, 2021, edition of Boiling Point, a weekly newsletter about climate change and the environment in California and the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
By virtue of the fact that you’re reading this newsletter, you’re probably aware today is Earth Day or as environmental reporters know it, “The day we get even more press releases than usual, but we keep doing the same job we’ve been doing all year.”
So I don’t have a special Earth Day edition of Boiling Point for you. I do, however, have some intriguing information about an idea that always seems to gets folks excited: Putting solar panels over water.
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I drove the trails of California s largest and most mysterious state park - and it was mind-blowing
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“Are you really going to do this?” my partner Steve says.
We’re sitting in a Jeep on top of a mesa in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park down near California’s border with Mexico, due west of the Salton Sea. The stark beauty of the cactus-speckled Colorado Desert and its badlands, dry lake beds and erosion-carved peaks spills out for miles in every direction.
Right in front of us is the Diablo Drop-off, a famously steep and uneven precipice that should only be attempted in favorable conditions with a high-clearance vehicle. Soft sands and occasional flash floods mean the drop can vary from mildly amusing to downright treacherous, but luckily for us, today it seems doable.
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