When most visitors think of Southern California, they think of freeways, theme parks, crowded beaches and everything hip and new.

But this is a land that also holds years of history within remote landscapes. And one of the best places to see that history close to an urban setting is the Little Blair Valley jeep trail in Anza Borrego Desert State Park.

In an eleven mile loop on a relatively easy sandy road, you can hike to pictographs, pass a nomadic Native American village, see miles of tracks from the old Butterfield Stage route, and find dozens of morteros worn smooth by a thousand years of grinding.

The turnoff for the Pictograph Hiking Trail is about four miles from where Little Blair Valley Road begins at Highway S2. This two mile round trip trail climbs between groups of interesting boulders into Smuggler Canyon. A large boulder contains pictographs left by the semi-nomadic Cahuilla and Kumeyaay people. They wintered in the desert and summered in the mountains, hunting deer, bighorn sheep and jackrabbits. The trail is a bit rough in places and does require careful foot placement as it winds through piles of boulders.

A very short distance from the Pictograph Trail turnoff is the sign for the Morteros Hiking Trail. This easy half-mile hike leads to a Native American village which was seasonally occupied by the Kumeyaay for nearly 1,000 years. The morteros (grinding holes) found in the boulders were created by Kumeyaay women as they crushed agave, mesquite beans, pinon nuts and acorns. Take time to explore a bit…you will find morteros scattered throughout the village, which is in a beautiful setting at the foot of boulder-strewn mountains.

Toward the end of the Blair Valley loop the road crosses the original Butterfield Stage Route. Built in the late 1850s by John Butterfield and 800 men, it carried passengers and mail from Missouri to San Francisco. The 2800-mile trip took about 25 days. There is a monument for the stage route at Foot and Walker Pass, where passengers had to get out and help push the stage up the trail. Wagon ruts from the Butterfield Overland Stage are quite deep and can be easily seen today.