Anza-Borrego Desert State Park ( ABDSP ) is a state park located in the Colorado Desert in southern California, USA. The park takes its name from the 18th century Spanish explorer Juan Bautista de Anza and Borrego, the Spanish word for bighorn sheep. With 600,000 hectares (240,000 ha) covering one fifth of San Diego County, ABDSP is the largest state park in California and the second largest in the United States adjacent.
The park occupies the eastern part of San Diego County and reaches the Imperial and Riverside areas, enclosing two communities: Borrego Springs, which is home to garden headquarters, and Shelter Valley.
Video Anza-Borrego Desert State Park
Geography
ABDSP is about two hours drive northeast from San Diego, southeast of Riverside or Irvine, and south of Palm Springs. The park is an anchor in the Mojave and Colorado Deserts Biosphere Reserve, and is adjacent to the Santa Rosa National Monument and the San Jacinto Mountains.
Maps Anza-Borrego Desert State Park
Visit
The ABDSP includes 500Ã, mi (800Ã, km) of dirt roads, 12 destination wilderness areas, and 110Ã, mile (180Ã, km) climbing trails to give visitors plenty of opportunities to experience a unique version of the park from the Desert Colorado neighborhood. Information and park maps, interpretative events and displays and listening devices for the hearing impaired are all available at the Visitor Center. ABDSP has Wi-Fi access to the Internet in different parts of the park, as do 55 other California state parks.
Many visitors approach the ABDSP from the eastern side of Coachella Valley through County Route S22 and State Route 78. Visitors can also approach from the western side of the Pacific Ocean through the California S79 or S67 Routes and add experience over the high and wooded Laguna Mountains. , as in Cuyamaca Rancho State Park. The highway rises from the coast to 2,400 feet (730 m) above sea level, then drops 2,000 feet (610 m) into the Borrego Valley at the center of the park.
The large bowl of the surrounding desert is surrounded by mountains, with the Vallecito Mountains to the south and the highest Santa Rosa Mountains to the north. They are in the park's wilderness area, without paved roads and with tributaries throughout the year at ABDSP.
Flora and fauna
The ABDSP habitat is primarily in the Colorado Desert ecosystem of the Sonora Desert ecoregion. The extreme north and east of the Peninsular Peninsula are in the California mountain region and forest ecosystems.
The park contains bajadas and washing the desert; colorful rock formations and barren land, arid landscape, and mountains. Bajadas are dominated by creosinant-bur shrubs with creosote shrubs ( Larrea tridentata) and palo verde-cactus bush ecosystems with palo verde trees ( Parkinsonia microphylla ), cacti, and ocotillo. In the sink, the Colorado/Sonoran microphylla forest can be found. These forests include plants such as the smoke tree ( Psorothamnus spinosus ), mesquite velvet ( Prosopis velutina ), and catclaw ( Acacia greggii ).
ABDSP has springs and natural oases, with the only original state palm tree, California Fan Palm ( Washingtonia filifera ). The display of seasonal wildflowers can be seen in plant community associations throughout the park. The high states in the north and east have enclosed cone pine forest, manzanitas and oak forests.
A lush oasis with different types of fauna, especially for bird watching. Throughout the park, visitors can see bighorn sheep, mountain lions, kit foxes, deer mules, coyotes, bigger street runners, golden eagles, black-tailed rabbits, ground squirrels, kangaroo rats, quail and hawk eagles. In the reptile class, desert iguanas, chuckwallas, and rattlesnakes of red diamonds can be seen.
Desert bighorn sheep
Some areas of ABDSP are the habitat for Peninsular bighorn sheep, often called desert bighorn sheep. Some garden visitors see them, and sheep avoids human contact. Analysts count this endangered species to study the population, and monitor the current decline of human encroachment.
Climate
Geology and paleontology
The arid soil eroded by ABDSP also gives a different view to the tropical past disappearing in the region. Outback of southeastern California is not always a desert. Paleontology, the study of the fossil remains of ancient life, is the key to understanding this prehistoric world. ABDSP has a remarkable fossil record that includes preserved crops, invertebrate shells, animal traces, and various bones and teeth. Most of the fossils found in the ABDSP date from six million to less than half a million years (Pliocene and Pleistocene times), or about 60 million years after the end of the dinosaur era.
Geology
ABDSP is located in a unique geological setting along the west margin of Salton Trough. This great topographic depression with Salton Sink which has a height of 200Ã, ft (61 m) below sea level, forms the northernmost tip of the active crevice valley and the geological continental plate boundary. Trenches extend north from the Gulf of California to the San Gorgonio Pass, and from the eastern edge of the Peninsular Peninsula eastward to the San Andreas Fault zone along the far side of the Coachella Valley.
Over the past seven million years, a relatively complete geological record of more than 20,000 feet (6,100 m) of fossil bearing sediments has been deposited inside the park along the western edge of the cracking valley. Paleontological heritages are widespread and diverse, and are found scattered on hundreds of square miles of arid, desolate soil that extends south from the Santa Rosa Mountains to northern Baja California in Mexico.
The marine and terrestrial environments are represented by this long and rich fossil record. Six million years ago, the Bay of California ancestors filled the Salton Trench, extending northward over what would become the city of Palm Springs. These tropical waters support many large and small marine organisms. Through time, the ocean gave way as large volumes of sediment eroded during the formation of the Grand Canyon spilled into Salton Trough. Little by little, the ancestral Colorado River built a huge river delta across the ocean. Hardwood fossils of delta sand and associated coastal deposits show that the region receives three times more rainfall than it is now.
The Anza-Borrego region is gradually changing from a predominantly marine environment to an interconnected terrestrial habitat system. In the north of the Colorado River Delta and occasionally fed by rivers, a series of lakes and dry lakes have survived for over three million years. At the same time, the precipitate is eroded from the growing Santa Rosa Mountains and other Peninsular Mountains to spread eastward into the trough. This sediment provides an almost uninterrupted record of terrestrial fossils, which ended only half a million years ago. Here, the ancient river and river deposits trap the remains of wildlife inhabited by vast peat pastures filled with riparian forests.
Fossils
These environmental and habitat change notes include more than 550 species of plant and animal fossils, ranging from microscopic pollen of preserved crops and algae spores to baleen whales and mammoth skeletons. Many species are extinct and some are known only from the remains of fossils found from this park. Combined with a long and complete sequence of sedimentary deposition, this diverse collection of fossils is an unparalleled source of paleontology of international interest.
Both the Pliocene-Pleistocene boundary and the age limit of American-American North American mammal land fall into a long geological record from the Anza-Borrego region. The environmental changes associated with this geological division of time may be better tracked by fossils from the Anza-Borrego region than in other North American continental platforms. This change preceded the beginning of the Ice Age, and the layer contains fossil clues to the origin and development of the modern southwestern desert landscape.
The first fossil, the sea shell of the ancient Gulf of California and freshwater shells from the prehistoric era of Lake Cahuilla, the predecessor of the current Salton Sea, was collected and described by William Blake in 1853. Blake is a geologist and mineralogist for the Pacific Railroad. The survey commissioned by Congress and President Franklin Pierce to find a train route to the Pacific. Blake first named this area the Colorado Desert.
Sea period
Since the late 19th century, many scientific studies and published papers have centered on marine organisms that inhabit the ancient Gulf of California. The fossil set from the classical Imperial Formation includes calcareous nanoplankton and dinoflagellate, foraminifera, corals, polychaetes, shells, gastropods, sea urchins, sand dollars, and crabs and shrimp. The sediment also produces the remnants of marine vertebrates, such as sharks and rays, bony fish, baleen whales, walruses, and dugongs.
The marine environment such as the outer and inner shelves, platform reefs, and beaches near the beach and lagoon are all represented in the "Imperial Formation". As the seas become shallower, the conditions of the oceans and brackish sea are prevalent, marked by the thick channel deposits of oysters and shell coquina shells that now form the "Elephant Knees" along Fish Creek. Many marine fossils are strongly associated with the forms of the Caribbean Sea. They documented the time before Panama is created, when the warm Gulf Stream from the western Atlantic Ocean invaded the waters of the eastern Pacific Ocean.
Terrestrial period
When North and South America were connected about three million years ago, terrestrial north-south fauna migration began on a continental scale called Simpagi Amerika Besar, and was present in the Anza-Borrego fossil. Animals such as giant ground sloths and hedgehogs make their first appearance in North America today.
The earliest vertebrate land fossils from the Colorado Desert precede the Gulf of Mexico's final Miocene invasion. These extremely rare fossils, which include a gomphothere, a rodent, a felid and a small camelid, are collected from rivers 10 to 12 million years old and lake deposits near the coast. However, the most significant and abundant vertebrate fossils have been found from the latest Miocene through the Pleistocene end river precipices and flooding of Palm Spring Formation in Vallecito and Badat Fish Creek and Ocotillo Conglomerate exposed in Borrego Badlands. This fossil collection takes place in the unbroken 3,5-million-year stratigraphic sequence that has been dated using the volcanic ash horizon and paleomagnetic methods.
The bestiary for this savanna landscape includes some of the most unusual creatures to inhabit North America - animals such as:
Geochelone , giant turtles; Aiolornis incredibilis , the largest flying bird in the Northern Hemisphere, with a 17-ft (5.2-m) wingspan; Paramylodon , Megalonyx and Nothrotheriops , giant ground sloths, some with bony armor on their skin; Pewelagus , very small rabbits (paleontologists can name with a sense of humor); Borophagus , a hyena-like dog; Acrtodus , a short-faced giant bear; Smilodon , a sharp-toothed cat; Miracinonyx , cheetah North America; Mammuthus imperator , the largest known mamut; Tapirus , an extinct tapir; Equus enormis and Equus scotti, two extinct species of the Pleistocene horse; Gigantocamelus a giant camel; and Capromeryx minor , dwarf pronghorn.
Native Americans
Native Americans of the surrounding mountains and deserts include the Cahuilla, CupeÃÆ' Â ± o, and Kumeyaay (DiegueÃÆ' Â ± o) Indian tribes. It was the homeland of these people for thousands of years, and their artists created the art of petroglyphs and rock pictograms expressing their culture.
Association of garden interpretations
The Anza-Borrego Foundation (ABF), founded in 1967, is a nonprofit educational organization and is the only association of ABDSP cooperation. He arranges all sales at the State Park Visitor Center and State Park Store.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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