Galleta Meadows Estate

By Joe Berk

So let’s say you’re a rich guy…not little rich from a corporate job where you’re overtitled and overpaid, but big rich as in inheriting a fortune from Dad. Let’s say Dad was George Avery, the guy who founded the label making company of the same name. We’re talking big bucks here, folks. What do you do with all that money?

Dennis Avery was the guy we’re talking about here. He was George Avery’s son and he was a good guy who did good things with his money. He gave away a lot to worthy causes both in the U.S. and overseas. Kids going to school. AIDS clinics. Authors writing interesting books. Kids’ athletic endeavors. And lots, lots more.

An author Dennis helped was George Jefferson (not the one from the TV sitcom The Jeffersons, but instead a guy who studied geology and dinosaurs). Jefferson wanted to write a book about dinosaurs and with Avery’s support, he did. That brings us to a point where Dennis meets Ricardo Breceda.

The 3,000-acre estate Dennis Avery bought is called Galleta Meadows. “Galleta” means cookie or biscuit in Spanish. It also refers to a species of grass (not marijuana, but actual grass) that grows in the area (see below).

Galleta grass. It grows up to about two feet tall and it thrives in the desert. The name is probably due to the plant’s seeds, which look like little flattened cookies.

But before we get there, Dennis started buying land in and around Borrego Springs, a small desert town northeast of San Diego. Mr. Avery liked it as is, and didn’t want to see it consumed by development as has happened in so many other parts of California. Score one for the good guys here, folks.

Breceda was a guy who grew up in Mexico, came to the United States, tried a few different business ventures, and ended up owning welding equipment. He wasn’t a welder initially, but he learned how to use the welding gear. Kind of like Joe Gresh. Breceda’s daughter had seen the new hit movie, Jurassic Park, and she wanted a dinosaur for her birthday. Breceda had a welding machine. You can see where this is going. After creating a dino for his daughter, Breceda started making and selling large metal sculptures. You can’t miss them. We’ve seen them in various parts of southern California, including a very large mastodon looking over the 60 freeway near Riverside not too far from where we live.

One day, Dennis Avery is driving by, and he notices the large metal creatures crafted by Breceda. He stops in to talk. See where this is going?

What looks like hair on Breceda’s sculptures is actually tiny strips of sheet metal. We have some cool things out in our California deserts.

To make a long and fascinating story a little less long and a little more fascinating, Avery and Breceda struck up a deal to repopulate Galleta Meadows with creatures from the Plio-Pleistocene age (a period combining the Pliocene and Pleistocene eras that began 5 million years ago and lasted until about 12,000 years ago). The concept took off from there, and the art expanded to include other creatures. One is the 300-foot-long dragon/sea serpent you see in the photos at the top of this blog and in the three photos below.

A sense of scale. The sea serpent dragon is huge. That’s my sister Eileen and my wife Susie taking it all in. You can walk under the coils further back.

It’s hard to imagine the labor that went into these sculptures.

We were astounded by the number of sculptures in the immediate area of the sea serpent. It surprised me that we didn’t the others at first; I guess it was because we fixated on the sea serpent sculpture I had programmed into my Waze navigation app.

While we were viewing the sea serpent and taking a bunch of photos, we saw another sculpture almost hidden in the nearby desert. We drove through the area’s dirt pathways to get a better look. Wow. You can walk right up to these things. It was amazing.

Another prehistoric beast, as interpreted by Ricardo Breceda. It almost seems life like.

A better shot, with the sun at my back. The old iPhone was getting a workout and it was doing a good job. I was thinking I could get better photos with my Nikon the entire time I was out there in the Anza Borrego desert. Anza Borrego translates into Bighorn sheep. They’re in the area, but we didn’t see any.

A closer shot of the beast above showing how Breceda used thin strips of sheet metal to simulate hair. Brilliant work, this is.

Then we spotted another sculpture 50 yards or so away. They were popping out like Easter eggs or seeing the whales in Scammons Lagoon down in Baja. At first you don’t see any. Then they suddenly appear in a manner that makes you wonder why you didn’t see them before. We were enjoying the experience.

Oppossums and other modern animals carry their young like this. The artist is brilliant. This rusty old things actually look alive.

Another view of the prehistoric mama and her baby. That dark spot under her tail? It’s another sculpture off in the distance.

After photographing the sculpture above, I looked around and there was yet another one way off in the desert. It was a camel of some sort. This was really cool stuff.

Would you walk a mile for this camel? I would and I will. I’ll be back with better equipment next time.

The entire adventure was sort of an Easter egg hunt, with our spotting yet another sculpture a rifle shot or so away that we hadn’t noticed driving into the area. I think you probably could see them all from the road if you knew where to look for them, but we didn’t know until we were at the sea serpent. I’m glad I didn’t know where to look. I felt like a little kid discovering one more each time I moved on to another. It was great fun.

When I finished taking the iPhone photos you see here, I thought I had captured all the sculptures. Boy, was I wrong. In researching the sculptures, the artist, and the man who sponsored it all, I was astounded to learn that there are actually 130 of these things scattered around the Galleta Meadows Estate. We had seen only a half dozen. You know what that means: Another trip. On the next one, I’ll bring along the Nikon D810 and my tripod, and I’ll get better pictures. That’s going to be really cool.

The obligatory selfie. Maybe I’m a narcissist. It was the middle of February, and it was a comfortable 70 degrees out in the Anza Borrego desert. My wife, my sister, and I had a great time

Getting there was both easy and fun. We started in Escondido and picked up California State Route 78 east. That’s a glorious ride on either a motorcycle or a car, winding through the mountains and then bringing you up to the Anza Borrego desert floor (where the sculptures reside). We stopped in Julian for breakfast and a delicious slice of apple and cherry pie along the way. It was a fun day.