This was a two-day effort.
And the second day was a REAL effort.
We spent the entire two days in the desert where there were no marked or
established trails, and no other people.
Just what we like. Solitude,
beauty, and discovery.
For our first day we wanted a relatively short hike because
we were going dancing that night and didn’t want to wear ourselves out. We found a spot at the end of a road across
from White Tank, and walked down a wash for about a mile. Then we saw another wash heading off to our
right, to the west, just followed it.
After awhile, the wash got smaller, as we headed into a
canyon. And to continue required a bit
of scrambling, nothing too serious, but we were working kind of hard. So we decided to leave the wash to see if we
could see a shortcut across the mountains to our starting point. We immediately saw there wasn’t an easy route
so returned to the wash and hiked back the way we came.
And went dancing!
The next day we decided to see if we could find where we
could enter that wash from the other side, and thereby create a fun 6-mile or so loop hike. We had a map of the area, and our two GPS devices, but nothing
more.
We hiked west about two miles from our starting point the day before, until we saw an opening in
the hills, and went south into that opening about half a mile.
We knew the
little loop where we ended yesterday’s hike was about a mile and a half from
where we were, but standing in front of us was a big hill. So we climbed it, and looked down into a long
and beautiful canyon. We could see the
general area where we had stopped the previous day in the far distance.
It is at these moments that I wish I had the gift my friend Doug Hesse has to be able to use words to describe a feeling. I'll do my best. We were looking down into a long valley, hiking in an area without trails. Complete solitude, complete silence. Unbelievable beauty.
So we headed down the hill and into a small wash which, of
course, in time became a deeper wash. We
had to do some scrambling at times, nothing major.
Then, the canyons became steeper, and we ran into an area
where the drop off was too great for us to be able to safely climb back out if
we needed to retrace our steps later.
At this point, we exited the wash and headed up the side of
it. Vicky went on one side looking for a
way around the steep drop off, and I went on the other. Vicky got some photos of me high on the side,
looking like I’m doing something much more daring than it actually was because,
to be completely open here, we don’t do daring.
We do careful.
Vicky snapped this photo of me. It looks like I am very daring, but I'm not. See me?
Here I am:
We found a way of scrambling around the big drop off and
continued for about 100 yards at which point we ran into a fairly high and
steep dry fall (dry waterfall). It was
about 12 feet high, with high canyon walls around it. Younger and stronger people who had
experience with climbing could probably have scaled it, but we are not younger
and stronger—we are older and weaker.
And wiser.
Even though we were only about ¼ mile from the place where
we had gotten to on the other side of the canyon we invoked our safety rule and
returned.
What was a bummer was that if we could have continued, the
hike back would have been a mile shorter than retracing our steps. In addition, remember that big hill we went
down to get into the wash? Now we knew
we had to climb it, and we were tired.
We felt only mild disappointment that we couldn’t create the
entire loop, but we were really pleased that we could disappear into the
mountains and hills and find our way to where the loop would have been. It was a blast. We developed some confidence as well in our
route finding and map reading skills.
Those might come in handy some day.
What an adventure! For the entire two days we didn't see anybody. We were alone, just the two of us, in the desert, exploring and taking in the beauty.
We were really tired after this hike, so did an easier hike
the next day.
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