Anza-Borrego in a Day: Badlands, Slot Canyons & Palm Oasis

The Borrego Palm Canyon Trail is the premier hike in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park and one of the most rewarding easy trails in Southern California. The 3-mile round trip follows a seasonal stream into a steep-walled granite canyon where a grove of more than 1,000 native California fan palms (Washingtonia filifera) creates a lush oasis amid the otherwise spare desert landscape. Individual palms in the first grove are estimated to be between 50 and 1,500 years old, their shaggy brown skirts of dead fronds hanging from trunks that reach 50 feet or more. The canyon provides critical habitat for Peninsular bighorn sheep, which are frequently spotted on the rocky walls and ridge tops in the morning hours — the park is home to one of the most important remaining populations of this endangered subspecies. The trail also crosses the stream repeatedly, requiring simple rock-hopping that keeps the hike engaging for families. Plan to arrive by 8 a.m. to have the canyon largely to yourself and to maximize bighorn sighting opportunities.

Font's Point — reached via 4 miles of loose sand wash road that requires a high-clearance 4WD vehicle or a 4-mile round-trip hike from the Borrego-Salton Seaway — offers one of the most vertiginous landscape views in California. The 500-foot drop to the Borrego Badlands floor reveals a badlands landscape sculpted from millions of years of lake sediments, river deposits, and volcanic ash — formations that record the entire Pleistocene history of the Salton Trough in geological cross-section. The same sedimentary layers that create the spectacular banded formations also preserve the bones of the Pleistocene megafauna — mammoths, mastodons, saber-toothed cats, and giant ground sloths — that are among the most abundant and complete fossil deposits in North America. The afternoon light, catching the angles of the eroded mudstone and clay, renders the badlands in shades of amber, rust, and pale gold.

Hellhole Canyon, accessible from the Hellhole Canyon Trailhead off Palm Canyon Drive, offers a 6-mile round trip through a dramatic desert gorge to Maidenhair Falls — a year-round waterfall fed by springs that sustains a hanging garden of maidenhair ferns, moss, and native willows in a setting that feels otherworldly in the desert context. The canyon also supports a population of Peninsular bighorn sheep, and the riparian corridor along the seasonal creek shelters an unusually diverse community of desert birds. The first 2 miles follow an alluvial fan through desert scrub before the canyon walls close in and the route becomes more technical.