TotSW: Mojave National Preserve

I love the moment of waking up in the morning at a campsite after having come in on the late side the night before, when one finally has a chance to really look at the surroundings and realize how stunning said surroundings are.  In this case, it was still light (barely) when we arrived in camp the previous evening, but in our rush to make dinner and get the tent set up, I didn't really pay attention to what the campsite looked like.  Morning light revealed big views peeking through the protective shade of the pines and juniper that grow at this elevation.  

The area around the Mid-Hills campground burned in 2005, but we were lucky enough to get one of the sites off the edge of the fire boundary that still had larger trees.  One of the great things about choosing non-"name brand" parks is that despite being just as gorgeous and interesting as some more well-known places, they can be almost empty.  In this case, we had no reservations but could just drive up and have our pick of sites, even in the campground.  (We were prepared to dry-camp in the backcountry, as is allowed here, if we didn't like the choices in the campground, but didn't need to do that after all.)

Another view from the site, with the broad almost perfectly symmetrical Cima Dome in the background.  The dome is an erosional feature left after an older granitic outcrop wore away, and is so broad that despite its almost 2000 foot height, it can be difficult to see except from a distance.  The small pockmark hills on its edge are cinder cones that grew in later.

After breakfast, it was time to explore.  Dirt roads are plentiful in this preserve.

The truck was quite happy in these surroundings as I navigated us to our hike.  

Cattle also seem happy in these parts.  

We got an early start on our hike at Hole-in-the-Wall, as the weather was expected to be hot.  On the way to the canyon, Chad noticed some petroglyphs on a boulder.

Heading into the entrance of Banshee Canyon, the rocks look very promising.

The rock here is mostly volcanic tuff, which has eroded out into jolly patterns.  Look closely for Chad in the second photo.

 

Birds also like the eroded-out pockets in the tuff.  See if you can spot the nestlings, whose parents wheeled above us on this section of the trail, skreeing loudly.

Shortly after the section with the entertaining birds, the canyon narrowed

and we discovered why this was called the "Rings Trail".

I chose not to use the rings.  More entertaining that way!  Welded volcanic tuff provides a friendly surface to climb on, as traction is good and there is a plentitude of firmly-attached inclusions to grab on to.  Hero rock, it is.

Silly Monsters at the top.

I couldn't help but notice that there was great potential for playing on the boulders

and couldn't resist, despite the fact that I had deliberately not brought climbing shoes, lest I leave the others bored.

Lounging in the sun.  I could have easily played in this section near the parking lot all day.

However, it seemed wise to get out of the sun, so we headed over to the visitor's center at Kelso depot and found a shady place to have lunch.  Kid gets crazo after calories are inserted.

Kelso Depot is a old Union Pacific railway station on the line out to Southern California, originally built because it was a convenient place to store the helper engines needed to get trains up the 2% grade of nearby Cima Dome.  Two percent doesn't sound like much, but getting heavy trains up 2000 feet at that grade in the era of steam engines was hard.  This location also was close to a reliable spring, providing necessary water.

After lunch, we poked around inside and read about the rail history of the area.

Old post office.

Since it was hot, we then went searching for a cooler hike.  Maybe a nice shady cave?

There is a lava tube here somewhere. (and lots of cinder cones)

Where is it?

Looks promising...

A civilized entrance.

Is it cooler inside?

Yes -- but avoid the bees!

 

The obligatory "It's hard to take photos in a cave" shot.

 This lava tube is very close to the surface, and has a series of skylights.  We liked the shafts of light pouring down.

 We tried to not kick up too much dust, but the dust did make the beams of light stand out.

All too soon, we were back on the surface.  Now exactly where was that lava tube again?

With the afternoon's heat still in full force, we chose to take a dirt "shortcut" along the Old Mojave Road on the way back to camp.  Shorter in distance, longer in time -- it gave us an excuse to stay in the air-conditioned truck.

The Old Mojave Road follows a historic route across the preserve, and the section we drove was an easy 4WD jaunt through the desert, at least under present conditions.  I really want to ride this route on a bike sometime.  At 150-ish miles for the whole thing, it'd take some careful planning:  one would have to arrange a shuttle, cache some water, and choose the right season (not too hot, not too cold, flash flood danger minimized, etc...).  One might want to acquire or borrow a fat bike, as some sections are quite sandy.

 

Jolly trail marker.

The road may look benign here, but whenever the route crosses perpendicular to the prevailing drainage direction, there are many, many, many dips across washes.  This is slow going.

Nice view back to the Kelso Dunes.  We thought about hiking over there, but the thought of climbing a 650 foot sand dune in almost hundred-degree heat seemed dumb.  Save it for another trip.

It was sort of fitting that we had to stop for a train to go by once we made it back to the paved road.  Said train was heading out up Cima Grade from Keldo Depot.

Chad and I enjoyed a walk in the waning light back at the campground after dinner.  There was definitely a temptation to bail on the rest of the vacation plans and just rattle around the Mojave for a couple of weeks -- the preserve is large, scenic, filled with interesting historical stuff to explore, and almost empty of people at that time of year.

Tour of the Southwest: Getting out of Dodge

You may have noticed in the last post I mentioned the June vacation.  You may have noticed that the route on the map was long.  Prepare for the next x posts to be about vacation, where x is large.

Other road trip vacations in recent years have acquired names, or should I say Names -- capitalized designator phrases that later loom large in the collective family imagination.  Tour of the West took us on a grand loop through scenic parts of UT, touching on parts of CA, NV, CO, and AZ on the way (and was also reminiscent of a family vacation of my childhood also referred to as Tour of the West). Tour of the Volcanoes followed the spine of Cascade Volcanoes up toward my parents' place.  These were obvious Names that easily fell into our conversational lexicon.

No such obvious name made itself known for this trip.  This year's route was sort of like Tour of the West, but slightly further south.  Tour of the Southwest didn't have a good ring to it, and sounded too much like Tour of the West, but we lacked imagination and started calling it Tour of the Southwest anyway while searching for a better name.  Never found a better name, so Southwest it is. Or maybe I should make an acronym.  TotSW?  Now I really want it to be TOWS.  Even though we weren't actually towing anything; the gear was all strapped on top.  We could have called it Tour of New Mexico, as exploring the area around Santa Fe is what kicked off the whole notion for this vacation, but New Mexico is a long way off, and as plans developed it became clear that there were many non-New Mexico places we were going to explore.  Tour of Southern California Mojave Flagstaff Arizona New Mexico Santa Fe Grand Canyon Cliff Dwellings Lava Tubes Desert Mountains Canyons Rivers Extravaganza?   ToSCMFANMSFGCCDLTDMCRE.

Hopeless.  Stick with Tour of the Southwest.  Don't want to type that a billion times, so TotSW for short.

Incidentally, we ended up following what is essentially old Route 66 and the route of the Santa Fe Railway most of the way over.  Not on purpose, but just because the route makes sense geographically, which is why the railway and roads were built where they were.  ToR66?  Nope.  Sticking with TotSW.

As is often the case with these trips, the first day was mostly driving before the play started.  After all, one does things within an easy day's drive of home on a more regular basis and we wanted to go new places.   So the first day was relatively long and uneventful; we listened to an excellent podcast to fill the time. (Bundyville, from Oregon Public Broadcasting.  Highly worth listening to both seasons from the beginning if you like this sort of thing; the journalist has done a brilliant job on this one -- but it's structured as a narrative so make sure you listen to them in chronological order.)

Shiny clean truck at the beginning of the trip, with extra gas cans ready to be filled.

By the time we filled up again later in the day, the windshield was full of bugs.  No more clean truck for the rest of the trip. (Dino gas always reminds us of vacations.  We like dinosaurs.)

 Jump forward many hours and miles.  It was 100 degrees in Baker, CA according to the World's Tallest Thermometer.  For comparison, the high at home that day was about 70.

Our destination for the evening (and the next couple of days) was the Mojave National Preserve, chosen because it was an intriguing-looking blob on the map that I had never visited.  And it was a (long) day's drive from home in the general direction of Santa Fe.  We had to stop in Baker before heading into the park to make sure that all gas vessels were full, as the preserve is large, full of 4WD dirt roads to explore, and doesn't have any gas stations in it.  

There is an excellent field of joshua trees on the edge of Cima Dome on the way in.  Parts of this preserve have a higher density of Joshua trees than does Joshua Tree National Park.

Long straight railway in the late afternoon light.  At this point, we were itching to find a good place to camp because we were hungry and didn't want to be setting things up in the dark.

An hour and half later and several dirt roads later, we found a nice campsite at the Mid-Hills Campground and settled in.  Fortunately, at 5600 feet elevation, it was much cooler here than down in Baker.

We slept well this first night, under a very dark sky, looking forward to exploring the desert in the morning.

May Miscellany

What do I remember from May?  Some small highlights:

Coninued knee recovery led to bike rides with Chad.

Kean had a couple of pieces of art in the district art show, including this piece that got an honorable mention.  There are many small bunnies hiding in the skull world, if you can believe it!

I went on a hike and found a swing.  Incidentally, this preserve was closed last week because a mountain lion and her three cubs were being a bit too friendly, and all I could pictures was three little big kitties playing on said swing, unlikely as that would be.

I found plans for a wee printing press; Chad promptly 3-D printed one for me to mess around with.

 

And of course, in May I was busy plotting our road trip route for June.  More on that trip over the next series of posts.

Small Cat

Small cat.

Large cat = 2 x small cat.

Mother's Day hash browns = 0.1 x Small cat.

 Last Day of School Kid = 17 x Small cat.

Let's just weigh everything in units of Small cat.