Borrego Springs is the perfect place for night photography and star-gazing. You will get surreal pictures of the sky (sometimes even the Milky Way) and giant art sculptures. We visited during the new moon phase so the sky was extra bright with stars – we’ve never see anything like it!
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Getting There
Anza-Borrego Desert State Park is located about 3 hours from Los Angeles.
If you are here specifically to see the Galleta Meadows sculptures, you’ll need to drive or walk around after getting inside the park. Not all of the sculptures are next to each other. Make sure to study the map beforehand or download an offline copy.
Galleta Meadows Sculptures
The Galleta Meadows Sculptures are available 24/7. There are over 100 sculptures here so plan your time accordingly! We suggest visiting during the day first so you kind of get an idea of where each sculpture is for your night-time shots. Unfortunately, we were not able to get here during the daytime so it was a little difficult navigating and trying to find the sculptures at night.
We arrived at Borrego Springs around 9PM and so only had time for a few sculptures since we didn’t want to camp here overnight. We did see a lot of people just hanging out at the sculptures and some were probably camping too.
Serpent
This is probably the most popular and most well known sculpture. We drove here first and of course, there were already a few groups of people also trying to take pictures. Everyone was pretty friendly though and communicated with each other so we wouldn’t ruin each other’s photos. Make sure to wear a mask or keep at least 6 ft distance between others!
The sky was filled with stars! It was such a stunning sight to see.
You don’t need to drive your car in to see it but we did because we wanted to take pictures of the car too. Brea actually drove her BMW Z4 here to take pictures of the car and the sculptures at night. The pictures turned out pretty well!
Scorpion vs Grasshopper
This was the second art sculpture we visited because Brea wanted a shot of the scorpion (#scorpioseason) for her birthday.
There was actually no one here when we arrived so we had the whole area to ourselves. There was only a group of people in their car hanging out on the street.
After an hour or so, we heard a lot of coyotes and noticed that the car had left so we got a little alarmed. We quickly took a couple more shots of Brea’s car and left.
We did try to find the T-Rex sculpture but after driving through the Elephants and Camels, we gave up. It was too dark and getting pretty late so we decided we’ll leave the T-Rex for next time.
Compared to Borrego Springs, Joshua Tree paled in comparison. This might have to do with when we visited each place though. Before visiting Borrego Springs, we looked up the moon phases and went during the new moon. This would ensure that the moon wouldn’t interfere with our shots.
This is definitely worth another trip! We will probably spend more time next time and camp as well.
