51³Ô¹ÏÍø

Some sunbeams from atop Font's Point in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. Camera is facing west towards Borrego Springs. Crepuscular rays /krɪˈpʌskjʊlər/ (more commonly known as sunbeams, sun rays, or god rays), in atmospheric optics, are rays of sunlight that appear to radiate from the point in the sky where the sun is located. These rays, which stream through gaps in clouds (particularly stratocumulus) or between other objects, are columns of sunlit air separated by darker cloud-shadowed regions 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.