By Steve Scauzillo, Staff Writer

My cautious side resisted the suggestion.

“Really, it is a tradition here in Borrego Springs,” explained our guide, Joe Raffetto of California Overland Desert Excursions.

My wife, Karen, and I hadn’t noticed that Raffetto had tossed his grimy baseball cap in the yellow Jeep we rode in on and put on a suede cowboy hat. He was ready for what would happen next.

I gave in. “OK,” I answered, lowering my head.

“Stand together. Look down at your feet. Walk 10 big steps, then stop and look up,” he instructed. I could hear my tennis shoes squishing against the coarse sand until I stopped and looked out.

My eyes feasted on a 360-degree panorama of the badlands of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, sprawled in Technicolor reality.

This Grand Canyon-like place appeared out of nowhere. The precipice held steady as hot desert winds tickled my back. I felt like “The Lion King’s” Simba on Pride Rock surveying my kingdom.

We had arrived at Font’s Point, a landmark four miles off County Road S-22 and Route 78, not far from the golf courses and emerging resorts of the small town of Borrego Springs, yet separated from civilization in both space and time.

Font’s Point, named after Father Pedro Font, the chaplain who accompanied Juan Bautista de Anza on the journey to Monterey in 1775, amazed those pioneers then and is still delivering today.

From the edge, I could see striated rock canyons carved by ancient riverbeds. It’s a place of mammoth fossils from the Pliocene Epoch unearthed by paleontologists. It was a place once teeming with giant mammals until the Colorado River veered south and left it dry.