The Navy established the Carrizo Bombing Range in 1942, as wartime training requirements drove the military to acquire large tracts of remote western land for live ordnance practice. The range operated through the war years and into the Cold War period, providing naval aviation training for successive generations of pilots who needed to practice bombing without risking populated areas. The Carrizo terrain — flat badlands intersected by eroded gullies, remote from towns, largely uninhabited — met the basic criteria. Seventeen years of operations deposited an unknown quantity of ordnance across the range, some detonating on impact, some not.

The ordnance that failed to detonate — duds, practice bombs that malfunctioned, munitions that hit soft ground and buried themselves — represents the range's legacy. Bombs were dropped in sizes from 3 to 1,000 pounds over seventeen years, and federal investigators have determined that some unexploded ordnance has sunk to depths of 30 feet or more through decades of sediment movement and soil consolidation. The depth and distribution make comprehensive survey difficult and remediation extremely expensive. The range carries the federal government's highest hazard classification for unexploded ordnance, which is less a precise description of current danger than an acknowledgment of how much uncertainty remains.

The Carrizo Impact Area's location in one of the most remote corners of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park has paradoxically protected it from remediation rather than exposing it to cleanup. Federal priority for unexploded ordnance cleanup is driven partly by proximity to populated areas and potential exposure — ranges adjacent to development or heavily used recreational areas get attention first. The Carrizo area's isolation means that relatively few people are at risk from the buried ordnance, which translates into low cleanup priority despite the high hazard classification. The bombs remain, slowly settling deeper into the Carrizo badlands.

The terrain the Navy chose for its bombing range was already one of the most geologically interesting areas in Southern California. The Carrizo Badlands are carved from the same Imperial Formation marine sediments that appear in the Coyote Mountains to the south — ancient seabed deposits exposed by erosion into a labyrinth of slot canyons, hoodoos, and gullied drainage that rewards geological exploration. The bombing added an additional reason to approach the area with caution: the same remote, difficult terrain that makes the badlands spectacular also makes ordnance removal complicated and access-based exposure risk harder to manage.

The Carrizo Impact Area abuts the Carrizo Creek Station site — the nineteenth-century Butterfield Overland Mail station that served Gold Rush emigrants heading toward California's goldfields. The juxtaposition is characteristic of the American West's layered history: Kumeyaay territory, then Spanish and Mexican transit corridor, then American stagecoach route, then military ordnance range, now wilderness with buried explosive legacy. Each layer was imposed on the same desert terrain without much acknowledgment of what came before. The badlands hold all of these histories simultaneously, the bombs and the stage station ruins and the geological record occupying the same ancient, eroding ground.