Fonts Point

The badlands spread out below Fonts Point are a landscape built and then carved away over roughly four million years. The layers of sandstone, claystone, and mudstone were laid down when this basin held a very different world: at times a tropical sea reaching up from the Gulf of California, at times the muddy delta of the ancient Colorado River, at times a lake. Fossil seashells found here prove the desert was once underwater, and the region has yielded remains of long-vanished creatures, from ancient camels and horses to a giant relative of the sloth.

Then water went to work in reverse. The soft, layered sediments erode easily, and the rare but violent desert downpours have knifed them into the maze of ridges, gullies, and dry washes you see today. The result is a badland in the truest sense, land too broken and barren to cross easily, but breathtaking to look down upon, every fold in the earth a page in a very long story.

The overlook takes its name from Father Pedro Font, a Franciscan priest who came through this desert with the expedition of Juan Bautista de Anza in the winter of 1775 and 1776. Anza was leading a party of men, women, children, and pack animals overland from Mexico toward the coast of California to found a settlement at San Francisco, and their punishing route crossed this dry, difficult country.

Font served as the expedition's chaplain and, importantly, its diarist, and it is his careful journal that records the hardship of the crossing. Looking out over this shattered, waterless expanse of badlands, he is said to have described it as the sweepings of the earth, a fitting name for a place that must have looked like the world's leftover rubble to travelers desperate for water and grass. The name Fonts Point keeps his memory, and his verdict, alive on the maps.

Fonts Point is reached from County Route S22, the highway that runs east out of Borrego Springs, by turning down Fonts Point Wash and following the sandy track a few miles to the small parking area near the rim. That final stretch is the catch: it is soft, deep sand that regularly traps ordinary cars, so a high-clearance vehicle, ideally with four-wheel drive, is strongly recommended, and the route is impassable when wet. Many visitors who lack the right vehicle arrange a jeep tour from town instead.

From the parking area it is only a short walk to the edge, where there are no railings and the cliff is crumbly, so stay well back and keep a firm hold on children. Time your trip for the first light of morning or the last hour before sunset, when the badlands are at their most dramatic, and plan around the seasons: winter and spring are pleasant, but the summer heat here is genuinely dangerous. Carry far more water than you think you need. On a clear night, if you can linger, the sky above Fonts Point fills with stars, a reminder that Borrego Springs is a designated dark-sky community.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.