San Felipe, Baja, Mexico
The geographical region of San Felipe is a pageant of natural beauty that fills the eyes with wonderfully diverse and rich images. Aquatic, terrestrial, botanical, astronomical and climactic extremes cloy the senses at nearly every turn. Poets and artists come here to be shocked into creative activity. Naturalists are rendered mute with wonder at the effete yet startling vigor of the desert ecology. Spiritual seekers look up at the star-heavy night sky and marvel. Marine biologists and fishermen are astonished at the variety of life in the Sea of Cortez. Long-married couples are moved to embraces during the mauve and scarlet sunsets. Young lovers abandon themselves to the gorgeous sunrises. It is a place that knocks down the fences of the imagination and attunes the senses to the subtle cycles of the natural world.

It seems that no matter where your preferences lie, there is someplace in or around the town of San Felipe to please your visual hunger. Pods of dolphins, the crashing dinner-dives of the brown pelicans, the regal flight of the frigate birds, the ever-changing shape of distant Isla Consag, the seasonal silvered frenzies of the grunnion, the shrimp boat fleet escaping the wind behind El Machorro and dozens of other sights are waiting for those who habitually turn their eyes toward the sea.

And for those who like the horizon to perform leaps of verticality, ridges of mountains raise their brown knuckles to the west. The Juarez range and the Sierra San Pedro de Martir hold up a traffic cop's hand to the moist Pacific-side weather and in the eastern shadow of this hand lies the San Felipe desert. Picacho del Diablo, at 10,500 feet the highest peak in all of Baja, lifts high above its neighbors and tailors the end of the day by unrolling a bolt of shade over the desert as the sun sets.