38 
Annual Reports of Academy of 
Retracing our way to Campo, our journey was resumed parallel 
to and but a short distance north of the Mexican line. East of 
Campo the surface became more broken and rolling, with curious 
hills bearing erosion resistant capping stones, showing the original 
plateau character of the land. Jacumba Hot Springs is but a few 
miles west of Wagon Pass, from which the road starts the long 
descent to the scorching flats of the Imperial Valley. Certain of 
the characteristic desert plants, as creosote bush ( Covtllea ), reach 
up tributary valleys of Carriso Creek to within less than two miles 
of Jacumba Hot Springs, the immediate vicinity of which is not 
at all like the Colorado Desert-Imperial Valley in its plant cover. 
About Wagon Pass numerous yuccas and cacti proclaimed the 
advent of more desert types. Certain grasshoppers of the Colorado 
Desert region, whose acquaintance we had made in past years, 
were in evidence at both of these localities, showing that elevation 
is not the essential factor controlling their distribution. 
From Jacumba Hot Springs, with its cool evenings, and Wagon 
Pass with its elevation of three thousand seven hundred feet, our 
route lay steadily down hill, with a regularly mounting temperature, 
through the few houses at Mountain Springs, then some miles of 
very rugged canyon—almost a gorge in fact—past Coyote Wells, 
and out on the floor of the intensely hot Imperial Valley. 
The Imperial Valley is but a portion of the great Colorado Desert, 
although the advent of irrigation, by means of canals from the 
Colorado River, has made possible the cultivation of a considerable 
portion of the lower levels of the region. Now we have thriving com¬ 
munities where twenty-five years ago the unredeemed desert held 
sway. The story of these canals, and of the destruction of their 
head-gates which caused the refilling of the Salton Sink, needs no 
retelling here. The deep gorge-like channels in the valley silt, 
through which the Colorado hurled its flood, are sufficiently im¬ 
pressive to show how the Salton came to be a “sea* again, repeating 
past history, as its ancient shore-lines testify. 
So much of the Imperial Valley is now under cultivation that it is 
exceedingly difficult to find any untouched country of easy access 
from its bustling communities, and we soon travelled northward 
toward the Salton Sea and the primeval waste of the Colorado 
Desert. El Centro (fifty feet below sea level) and the other Imperial 
Valley towns were then enduring a shade temperature of 114 0 , 
