Since we were staying in Borrego Palm Canyon Campground. The trailhead was just a feet hundred feet from our campsite. On Thursday, there were fewer hikers especially at 9:30am. This trail can get pretty busy especially on the weekends. Plus it is a popular trail for school & nature tours with a day-use, fee-based parking lot on the north side of the campground.
The reason it’s a popular hike is it an easy well-maintained trail with a creek & waterfall. Plus Bighorn Sheep are often in the area and spotted on or close to the trail. Seeing and photographing Bighorn Sheep was my main goal when booking this campground. But they are wild and unpredictable so we did not see any this day.
The Palm Grove Oasis area at the end of the trail is off-limits so the trail ends in a rocky overlook. Charring of the palm trunks is visible on most of the tall palms. New growth is flourishing and hopefully they’ll be able to open the area up again in a few more years. Since this is our first trip here, we do not have any idea what it was like before the fire.

No Bighorn Sheep spotted during our hike this morning so after grabbing lunch at Carlee’s Place in Borrego Springs. We headed up Montezuma Valley Rd since Bighorn Sheep are often spotted along that stretch of Anza-Borrego. Along the way, we drove by the DeAnza Country Club where other hikers mentioned seeing sheep – no luck there either. Their website has a photo of several Bighorns drinking from the golf course water hazard – pretty funny. So they do visit there during the drier time of the year.
The drive up Montezuma Valley Rd is scenic, with a beautiful panoramic vista at the lookout, but no sheep were spotted. It’s actually an alternate route to San Diego and we passed several RVs as we drove to the summit before turning around.
So I settled on metal ‘animals’, photographing some of the sculptures we missed during our Jan Anza-Borrego day-trip. Photographing wildlife is very much like fishing or going whale watching.