Drive to Agua Caliente from Ocotillo
The adventure begins. Once again, we are Zack Attack (man), Tara the Dactyl (woman) and Malachi the Wonder Beast (doggo) and our trusty camper, The Grolar Bear. Our goal, to explore new lands and see wondrous sights and, I suppose, to live deliberately in a Whitmanesque sort of way. We don’t take ourselves very seriously though. Our level of serious is very low indeed.
We left San Diego in the afternoon after loading up on supplies including extra dog food for Malachi the Wonder Beast. The Wonder Beast has very particular food needs. Currently we have him eating Pura Vida which suits his sensitive belly well. As an afterthought, we also got a few human food items since the Wonder Beast is sometimes stingy about sharing his food.
Since we were leaving from San Diego we decided to drive out to the desert first. We got off the freeway at Ocotillo and checked out Agua Caliente County Park. I had heard about the mineral hot springs there. The park was nice, backed against the big, bouldery hills that are so typical of east San Diego County and Imperial County especially in the Anza Borrego region. More oriented to RVs than overlanders for sure though. The hot springs were not so much the hot springs I envisioned, but pools that were fed by the hot springs (piped in.) So not very rustic, just kind of nice pools. They were very nice for a dip after our hike though. We did a short hike that led directly off the campground called Moonlight Canyon. A fairly gradual grade through the rocky landscape led through a smallish slot canyon before looping back into the campground. The rocky slot canyons and the surrounding landscape of the Anza Borrego Region are quite unlike anything else if you’ve never been out that way. Kinda of like you’ve landed on another planet closer to the sun. We saw no Big Horn Sheep which are prevalent out in Anza Borrego, but we kept our eyes open.
We never did see the ranger, but self-registered at the kiosk. $24.00 bucks for a tent site and another buck for the doggo. I think is this typically price for San Diego County Parks. The tents sites were mostly abandoned and since the Grolar Bear is barely bigger than a large truck we snuck into one of those sites with a few more trees.