The hook
A seventy-foot stone tower and a maze of boulders carved into animals sit together off the interstate near the Mexican border, both the work of men with time and not much else.
01Why it's worth it
In the 1920s a developer named Bert Vaughn built this stone tower on the old Yuma-to-San-Diego road to mark how brutal the desert crossing used to be before the highway, a month across blasted moonscape. It's five stories, with a small museum inside and a view over a hundred miles of desert from the top. But the better part is next door. In the 1930s an out-of-work man named Ratcliffe spent two years carving the granite boulders around the tower into creatures, a lizard, a buffalo, a coiled snake, a skull, for a dollar a day and a jug of wine, with no plan beyond what struck him, and left behind a scramble-through rock maze that kids and adults both love. Both are on the National Register now, early roadside Americana that somehow survived.
02How to experience it
It's off Interstate 8 at the In-Ko-Pah exit near Jacumba, out in the far southeast corner of the state, about an hour and a half east of San Diego. There's a small fee to climb the tower and poke through Boulder Park, and hours vary, so it's a roadside stop best paired with a drive out to Anza-Borrego or the desert beyond.