Painted Rock Mountains The Gila River crosses all of southern Arizona from southwest New Mexico, and is the drainage for about 1/2 of Arizona (the south). The highest elevation in the mountains is "unnamed" at , and is located at the central & east region of the range. (The range has many northwest-by-southeast ridgelines.) Painted Rock Mountains The Painted Rocks Mountains are a short 15-mile (24 km) long mountain range of the north-central Sonoran Desert southwest of Phoenix, Arizona and in southwest Maricopa County. The Gila River flows through the central-north end of the range. The famous Painted Rock Petroglyph Site lies at
Anza-Borrego Desert State Park badlands also provide a different view into the region's long-vanished tropical past. The inland of southeastern California was not always a desert. Paleontology, the study of the fossilized remains of ancient life, is the key to understanding this prehistoric world. ABDSP has an exceptional fossil record which includes preserved plants, a variety of invertebrate shells, animal tracks, and an array of bones and teeth. Most fossils found in ABDSP date from six million to under a half million years in age (the Pliocene and Pleistocene epochs), or about 60 million years after the last dinosaur age ended. ABDSP lies in