Pushawalla Plateau Hike: We get lost….we think

Getting to the trailhead for this hike requires a high clearance vehicle.  This means that it is not one of the more established and popular hikes in the park.  Today we were the only people on the trail, and that is fine with us. 

The downside is that the trail is not marked as well as we have seen for other trails.  We followed the hiking book and Topo map as best we could, but did not make it to the plateau at the top.  In fact, we were ¼-1/2 mile from the top by the time we turned around.

About ¾ of a mile into the hike we passed Pinyon Well, which was once a major source of water for the area.  There were still a holding tanks, foundations, etc.  And lots of old tin cans.  Interesting.

We continued up the wash, which also served as the mining road at one time. 

About ¼ mile later we came upon something totally unexpected:  a 40 foot segment which was laid in asphalt many years ago.  Why just this one spot we could not guess.  

Our hiking book indicated that 1 ½ miles from the trailhead we were to turn on the left fork of the wash, and then about 1/3 mile later the trail would turn sharply south. 

At 1 ½ miles we did see a fork turn off to the left but it turned directly south right then, not 1/3 of a mile later.  The book also said that if one went to the right, incorrectly, the fork ended in a dead end. 

Well, it didn’t.  We know because it kept going (and a lot of footprints in front of us kept going) until we came to several more forks.  Up one of them we found another mine, not on our map or described in the hiking book.   A Ranger told me later that there were hundreds of abandoned mines in the park.

 

We turned around there, and went up another wash.  We got about ½ mile up this fork and found we were no longer hiking but were scrambling and had clearly lost the trail, along with dozens of other people in the past.

So we came back. 

We have decided that the best explanation is that we were to turn left at that fork at 1 ½ miles, even though it headed off in the wrong direction.  However, and more confusingly, the map my GPS drew looks like we went the right way.  (comparing it with the TOPO map).  There were cairns (a few) along the trail (most past this junction, oddly) but no cairns indicating this wash at 1 ½ miles was the correct one.  And NOBODY had gone that direction for months, maybe years (the desert preserves everything, even footprints, for a very long time)

Oh well, who cares.  It was a fun 5.4 mile hike with 1100 elevation gain.  We saw some interesting historical structures.  One day we will return and take the other fork and see if that leads us to the plateau.