Desierto Encinas is an impossible human habitat in any proper sense; it is merely a broad and hardly passable boundary between habitats. The hardy stock of the frontier ranchos, pasturing partly on the thorny fruit of the cholla, push far out on the plains, and are sometimes watered for short periods, under strong guards of heavily armed vaqueros, at Barranca Salina; yet the greater part of the expanse is trodden only by the Seri. Two or three ruined frames of Seri jacales and a few graves crown the low knoll near Pozo Escalante, and there are one or two house remnants near Barranca Salina; these are notable not only as the easternmost remaining outposts of Seri occupancy, but because they represent the only known instances in all Seriland of the erection of even temporary houses adjacent to water. Distinct paths, trodden deep by bare Seri feet, radiate from both waters toward the Seriland interior, but no traceable trails extend eastward.
The southern limit of Desierto Encinas is marked either by the broad mud-flats opening into Laguna la Cruz or by the coast of the gulf, the coast cutting the lower portions of the plain being accentuated by a sand-bank 30 or 40 feet high, against which the surf thunders in nearly continuous roar, audible halfway or all the way to Pozo Escalante. A Seri trail skirts the crest of this bank, sending occasional branches into the interior. At Punta Antigualla the bank expands and rises into a great mammillated shell-mound nearly 100 feet high, with several of the cusps occupied by more or less ruined jacales; and occasionally occupied houses occur midway thence to the southernmost point of Sierra Seri, and again at the base of the first spur east of Punta Ygnacio. Beyond Punta Antigualla the sweep of the waves is stronger than in Bahia Kino, and the coastal sand-bank is generally higher. Between the rocky buttresses of Punta Ygnacio and the next spur eastward the sand-ridge rises fully 50 feet above mean low tide, and here, as elsewhere, its verge is protected by a fog-fed chaparral thicket with occasional clumps of okatilla and other cacti. Behind the coast barrier lie lagoon-like basins, generally dry and floored with saline silt-beds, though sometimes occupied by briny pools formed through seepage during southwesterly gales; and there are physiographic indications that the northwestward extension of Laguna la Cruz formerly stretched some miles farther than now and lay in the rear of Punta Antigualla in such wise as to form a source of supply of the clam-shells of which the eminence is built.