The hook
Scattered free across the open desert around Borrego Springs are a hundred and thirty giant rusted-metal animals, including a three-hundred-and-fifty-foot serpent that surfaces from the sand.
01Why it's worth it
A wealthy landowner named Dennis Avery had a notion: instead of leaving his desert plots empty, fill them with sculpture, unfenced and free, for anyone to wander. He hired a self-taught metal artist, Ricardo Breceda, who over years built more than a hundred and thirty life-size and larger figures out of welded steel, prehistoric mammals and dinosaurs that actually roamed this desert millions of years ago, plus historical scenes, plus pure invention, most famously a serpent whose head and coils break the surface of the ground across a road, three hundred and fifty feet end to end. You drive the sandy lanes of Borrego Springs and keep coming upon them: a mammoth here, a raptor there, a stagecoach. It's delightful and completely uncurated.
02How to experience it
It's around Borrego Springs, deep in the Anza-Borrego desert, about nine hours from the Bay. The sculptures sit on open land free to visit any time; grab a map locally since they're spread across many plots, and go in the cool months. It pairs naturally with Anza-Borrego's slot canyons and, in a wet spring, the wildflowers.