Southern Cal: Trip Overview, and Imperial and Kofa NWRs, January 13, 2020

Mark, Fr. Charlie, and I made a 4 day driving trip to the Southern California desert. We went to the Imperial National Wildlife Refuge, the Kofa National Wildlife Refuge, the Salton Sea (including the Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge), and Joshua Tree National Park.

I’ll do three posts for this trip; first for the Imperial and Kofa NWRs, followed by a post for the Salton Sea, and finally a post for the Joshua Tree National Park.

Here is a map of our trip. You can zoom in and out on the map. Click/touch the icon in the upper left to see locations for each day. I didn’t take great notes, so I may not have all the stops exactly right, but they are close.

The Imperial NWR borders the Colorado River in both Arizona and California. We stayed on the Arizona side. We went to three viewpoints. There were a lot of birds, but none of the places we went were very good for photography. The birds were too far away. I included some shots anyway. I got some shots of other birds (e.g. Common Goldeneye, Cimmamon Teal, Osprey with fish, Double-crested Cormorants, etc.), but they aren’t good enough to post.

The Kofa NWR was created in 1939 to protect the Desert Bighorn sheep. It’s the second largest NWR in the country. The name is derived from an old gold mine called King of Arizona (KofA) mine. If you’re interested, there is more information on the Kofa NWR here. Mark was a great guide, and took us to a beautiful spot. We were there for the sunset, and the mountains turned a gorgeous shade of red at sunset. The pictures show a mountain (Signal Peak on the left) with a canyon (shaded area in the middle). The canyon is called Palm Canyon, and it contains the only indigenous California Palms in Arizona. We didn’t make the hike into the canyon.

We decided not to spend another day at the Imperial NWR, but instead headed to the Salton Sea for Day 2, which will be the topic of my next post.