Centered in the arid Borrego Badlands due east of the Visitors Center between County Road S-22 and Route 78, four million years of geologic and paleontologic history are exhibited across a stark desert landscape. Conglomerates, sandstones, claystones and mudstones, compressed and hardened, chronicle a variety of landscapes, fossil life forms and climates that no longer exist at Anza-Borrego.
More than 200 years ago, the Spanish explorer Juan Baustista de Anza passed Font's Point leading a band of men, women and mules northward to Monterey, California. The path he forged through the desert followed San Felipe Wash. Father Pedro Font, who served as official chaplain, diarist and observer on Anza's expeditions of 1775-76, described this vantage point of the Borrego Badlands later named for him as the "sweepings of the earth."
Font's Point may be the best place in North America to view sediments of the Pliocene and Pleistocene Epochs. But the visitor has to stretch their imagination to visualize a landscape devoid of cacti, Ocotillo and Creosote Bush. During the Pliocene Epoch, (1.6-5 million years ago), Anza-Borrego was located south of the border as a receiving basin for the ancestral Colorado River while it carved out the Grand Canyon.