On our way down into the main valley, I wanted to stop and do some canyon scrambling. It being our actual anniversary, Chad willingly complied :)
One of my guidebooks had listed an interesting-looking obscure canyon, with sketchy instructions to the effect of "park on the side of the road 5.8 miles east of the campground, walk up the alluvial fan to the canyon mouth just to the right of the grayish hill at the base of the mountains". Mileages in the book haven't been super accurate, at least according to our odometer, so we didn't worry too much when there wasn't a wide enough spot to park in until about 3/4 mile past the indicated parking spot. There are also a bunch of different interesting drainages to explore in the Panamint Range, so if we missed, it wouldn't necessarily be a big deal.
So, we parked in that wide spot at the side of the road and started walking up the fan.
We did have the presence of mind to look back at the van to try to spot some reference points to where we parked -- sort of lined up with the western side of the big alluvial fan across the way.
It didn't take long for the van to seem like a tiny white dot in the distance. I was glad the white pops out of the landscape as well as it does; we might have run into trouble if had been another color, say, tan...
Promising-looking drainages.
After a bit, the broad wash we were following turned into more of a canyon. Let the fun rock scrambling begin!
As I had suspected, after a while, I could no longer align what I remembered of the description of the canyon in the book with the reality on the ground. We were in a different drainage. No matter -- it is all fun! It eventually became clear that we were in a side drainage that sort of connected up with the more well-known Mosaic Canyon. We just took the scenic route away from those who don't favor hair-brained routes :)
A jolly, but quite do-able downclimb was needed to drop into Mosaic Canyon. The hikers below seemed to think we were a bit weird...
Now we had hiked in about as much distance we had originally planned, but the terrain was interesting and the day was nice. Let's just add a few bonus miles of hiking and scrambling!
Since the hike had turned into a longer expedition than planned, on the way back down we took the easy route that followed the main Mosaic Canyon past the point where we entered it, and then scanned the horizon for the van. Can you see it? Knowing it was toward the left side of the alluvial fan coming off the far mountains, we could, and started walking that way.
See, it's getting closer. You would think that this is easy walking, but there is quite a bit of navigation around and climbing through small washes needed, so it takes time.
Eventually, we made it back to the vehicle and drove the long straight road into the valley
and down to Furnace Creek. It being our anniversary, I had booked our one hotel room of the trip. It was really nice to be able to take a shower!
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