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.
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