What is your favorite location in the Park? 

Fred: Fish Creek is still my favorite location in the Park. Patrolling and living there for three years and then using it as a backdrop for programs or just showing off the Park in one area continues to be a reason to visit and enjoy that part of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. 

LLouise: All 650,000 acres! 

What is your favorite season in the Park and why? 

Fred: The best season in the Park is springtime when temperatures are nice, and one can visit with many folks coming here for the first or numerous times.  

LLouise: All of them- the heat, wind, snow, rain, flowers, silence, dark skies and sparkling stars with milky way drifting past. walking in starlight bright enough to cast a shadow.

Tell us about your first experience in the Park. 

Fred: My first experience in the park was Sept 10, 1975. I was assigned to this place where I didn’t even know existed by the California Park System. I viewed the Borrego valley from Crawford Overlook on that afternoon thinking OMG.  

If you could be any desert animal or plant, what would it be and why? 

Fred: Roadrunner would be choice animal. It is fearless, agile, and can fly.  

LLouise: I’d be a palm tree in a grove with skirts down to the floor, a fantastic housing complex. 

How long have you been visiting the Park? 

Fred: I have been in this Park since Sept 10, 1975….50 years? 

LLouise: How long? I visited April 1976. Lived in it starting August 1977 in Fish Creek, as an outpost ranger’s wife.

What’s your number one reason for supporting ABF? 

Fred: I support ABF because it truly supports the Park where I spent most of my life professionally and personally.  

LLouise: It’s a challenge to preserve & protect an amazing space that has amazing resources- tranquility, but endangered by swiss-cheese land ownership, and the thought that a ‘park’ is a geographic space that can be reserved & set aside for better use later when “WE” need it. A common definition of desert = waste land [worthless] unless you get to use it for something ‘better’. 

If you’re interested in being featured in an upcoming eConnection, please reach out to Communications & Marketing Director Jaime Purinton at [email protected].