After a night of camping in Anza Borrego’s Culp Valley grounds, we hiked around the area for a little, then packed up our gear to head over to Slot Canyon. I had been wanting to explore here for a while after seeing so many interesting pictures from within the slots. I found the GPS coordinates with a little help from Yelp and we followed the winding desert highways to a little paper sign that pointed us towards the off-road route…
A bumpy ten minutes later, we pulled into a parking lot full of eager hiker couples, Boy Scouts, and, of course, more RVs. The canyon ridges spanned farther than our eyes could see, so we decided to just go for it and venture into the nearest pathway that we could climb down. Following the zig zagged cut-out walkway between the walls of the canyons, we went deep into the slots, finding little caves and narrow openings left and right…
Having been there for some time, we decided to take a break and find a nice spot to open up our makeshift tortilla PB & J sandwiches. We climbed to the top of one of the little mountains and found the most relatively smooth area to set up a picnic. Overlooking the landscapes around us, we sat and took in what a successful weekend it was – from the playing around in the Mount Laguna snow and eating apple pie in Julian to camping in the Anza Borrego desert and exploring Slot Canyon.
Breanne Burnell 