Font's Point

Author's Comments

The road in is the first honest thing about this place. Four miles of soft sand off the main highway, and if you do not have clearance you will know it within the first half mile. I have turned around once and made it through twice, and the difference was mostly the week's weather. But what waits at the end is one of the strangest landscapes in Southern California. The earth simply gives way. You walk to the edge expecting a view and instead you get a collapse - a furrowed, eroded basin dropping out beneath your feet, ridges and ravines cut into pale sediment that goes on for miles toward the Salton Sea. People call it a miniature Grand Canyon and that is not quite right. The scale is smaller and the color is different. It is closer to bone than to red rock. Sunrise is when this place earns its reputation. The badlands face roughly east, and in the first twenty minutes of light the shadows are long enough to read every fold and channel in the sediment. By eight in the morning the contrast has flattened and the photograph is gone. Winter and early spring are the seasons - the air is clearer, the Salton Sea sits more sharply on the horizon, and you can stand at the edge without the desert pressing down on you. I have rarely shared this overlook with more than two or three other people. Whether that is the road or the hour, I cannot say. Bring a wide lens and something longer for the distant ridges. And stay past the obvious moment. The light keeps working for a while after you think it is finished.

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