Feature Article

The coming year 2007 will celebrate both Anza-Borrego Desert State Park’s 75th anniversary – and the Park’s forty-year partnership with the Anza•Borrego Foundation and Institute.

Though the Foundation’s beginnings were humble, its dreams were big:  to acquire and deed to the Park some 60,000 acres of private lands within its boundaries. Over the years, we whittled away at this daunting figure, then in 1998 initiated a series of campaigns to purchase several large ranches to the west of the Park, an expansion envisioned by pioneering landscape designer Frederick Law Olmstead. Cattle operations, some dating to Spanish land-grant days, were shutting down. The land could either be commercially developed – or be restored and forever preserved. By 2006, hard work and creative fundraising gained the Park six ranches: Sentenac, Mason Valley, Lucky 5, Vallecito, and Las Arenas. A total of nearly 9,000 acres.

Still, private land remains within the Park, and our sights are now set on over
22,000 acres in the viewshed of an historic corridor – the route followed in 1775 by California’s first emigrants. Their leader was Captain Juan Bautista de Anza, namesake of the Park.

And so: We are launching The Anza Trail Initiative, a campaign to acquire these lands, and by doing so, reduce the Park’s inholdings to between 1-2% of its total area. (And, not to worry, we’ll still pursue that last bit.)

Already, the campaign is off to a rousing start. We are pleased to announce that in early January the Resources Legacy Fund Foundation through its Preserving Wild California program awarded the Anza•Borrego Foundation a $700,000 grant to purchase wilderness inholdings in upper Coyote Canyon. This is a matching grant, with $500,000 to be provided by California State Parks and $200,000 the responsibility of the Anza•Borrego Foundation. This figure can include the value of properties ABF acquires anywhere along the Anza Trail.

We look to you, our members, to help raise our share of this. The math is appealing: every dollar you donate will leverage an additional six dollars! The total of $1,400,000 will go a long way in – at last – creating a Park with an unbroken expanse of serenity and natural wonder.

As you will discover, this issue of our Desert Update features three articles on the Anza Trail. The ten days the emigrants spent traversing the Park are described in “El Expedición de Capt. Juan Bautista de Anza.” There is a guide to “Following the Anza Trail Through Anza-Borrego Desert State Park®.” And in “Imaging the Anza Trail” we take a behind-the-scenes look as to how the Park’s L. Louise Jee tracks inholdings with computer graphics.

It has been our forty-year goal to make the Park whole as a legacy for future generations. In a way, it is a legacy initiated over two and a quarter centuries ago by Captain de Anza and his settlers as they described and named the area, and sought a better life and a better world.

Get the entire Newsletter in PDF by clicking here.

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