A paragraph may be fitly introduced here concerning the present status (1921) of the roads we traversed on our tour to the Imperial some six years earlier. The most trying sections have been improved; the heavy sand where we wallowed about so helplessly and the broken, oiled road between Dixieland and Coyote Wells—in fact, the whole stretch between the foot of the mountain grade and El Centro—is a first-class boulevard now. There is also pavement from Campo to the summit of the range, and the descent, while not paved, is in good condition. Only a fraction of the two routes we pursued in San Diego County—the northern, via Descanso, and the southern over the Potrero grade—has been paved, but the funds for this work have been provided and it is to proceed as rapidly as possible. Taken altogether, the roads to-day average good and the run between San Diego and El Centro may be easily made by the shorter of the routes (122 miles) in five or six hours.
While bowling along just beyond Dixieland one of our party cried, "Look at the sunset!" and we brought the car to a sudden stop. I have seen gorgeous sunsets in many parts of the world, but nothing that could remotely approach the splendor of the scene that greeted our admiring vision. The sky was partly clouded—rather unusual, we learned—and this accounted for much of the glorious spectacle. The whole dome of the heavens showed a marvelous display of light and color—lucent silver slowly changing through many variations to deep orange-gold, and fading slowly to burnished copper as the sun declined. The clouds lent endless variety to the color tones. Their fantastic shapes glowed with burning crimson or were edged with silvery light. The sky eastward was of a deep indigo-blue; westward, above the sun, it burned with ethereal fire. The summits of the dimly defined mountains in the distance were touched with a fringe of golden light and their feet were shrouded in a pale lavender haze—the effect of the sun on the drifting sand. The weird and ghostly appearance of the Superstition Range, a dozen miles to the north, seemed suggestive of the name. Surely the desert gnomes and demons might find a haunt in the rocky caverns of these giant hills set down in the wide arid plain surrounding them on every side. The more distant mountains faded to dim and unsubstantial shadows and were finally obscured by the falling twilight.