Headed up Split Mountain.
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Up Fish Creek
Split Mountain Drive is like something from an Indiana Jones Movie
- Trip taken in February, 2004.
The lost city of Petra,
Jordan, is a long way from San Diego.
This faraway place, where the final scenes of the 1989 movie “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” were shot, came to mind in a trip to Split Mountain, in the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park.
The spectacular Petra gorge, where Indiana, his father and the hated Nazis discover the temple holding the holy grail, is a three- to five-hour drive from the Jordanian capital, Amman.
Split Mountain, up the Fish Creek wash in Anza-Borrego, is about an hour and a half from central San Diego.
Like the scene in the movie, cruising through Split Mountain puts drivers at the base of shear sandstone cliffs, rising perhaps a hundred feet or more from the dusty bed of Fish Creek.
At about 200 feet, the split in Split Mountain is a bit wider than the Siq — the route into Petra — so you won’t need to walk (although there are Siq-like crevices in other parts of the park). The creek bed narrows in spots, but stays well wide enough for an SUV to make it through. Still, drivers feel swallowed up as they slide on the sand.
The temples and other remains of the great city are missing, as the Nabataeans were never here. All you’ll find in Anza-Borrego are fossils.
One of the more spectacular and popular drives in the State Park, the Fish Creek/Split Mountain trail is just 20 miles southeast of the visitors center in Borrego Springs.
With the hot summer temperatures long gone, I headed out once again to tour San Diego’s beautiful eastern entry, the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park.
The Miata was left home and a Jeep Liberty secured, as I hoped for a day of driving on dirt. And, being more of a novice off-roader, I was looking for something easy.
