Journey With a Baja Burro

Baja California is a land apart. For more than 150 years from its “discovery” in 1533, it defied all attempts to establish a permanent European settlement. A dangerous, fog-shrouded Pacific shoreline, contrary ocean winds and currents, the capricious Gulf of California, and extensive tracts of virtually impassable desert in the north kept it apart from the rest of New Spain. When it was settled by Europeans, it was by Jesuit missionaries who, for seventy years, vigorously tried to exclude those with less godly intentions than their own. Later, the aridity and ruggedness of the land protected it well into the twentieth century.

Baja California was the original California. The mission system (which brought the native peoples under the control of Catholic Spain) and the name, “California,” spread north from there, and more specifically from the tiny pueblo of Loreto.
Today, a carved inscription above the entrance to Loreto’s mission church proudly proclaims: “Oct. 25, 1697. The Head and Mother of the Missions of Lower and Upper California.”

For six months through the winter of 1997-1998, Graham Mackintosh and his endearing pack burro Misión walked from the Mexican border town of Tecate 1000 miles south to Loreto to mark the 300th anniversary of the founding of the Loreto mission.

Walking along trails, dirt roads, and sometimes on Baja's main highway, man and donkey endured frightful El Niño storms and traversed frigid pine-covered mountains and sometimes flooded deserts to visit most of the Dominican, Franciscan and Jesuit mission sites along the way.

In this entertaining and often inspiring account packed with fascinating historical information and spiritual speculation, Journey with a Baja Burro invites the reader to leave behind the comforts and cares of the modern world and venture into Baja's rugged, remote back country and into the mindset of an earlier age - to a place where even shadows and illusions can lead to truth.