It’s that time of year again, time for me to play desert rat for a week. Thanksgiving is a great time to head to the desert. Temperatures are mild to cold and crowds are generally light (except on the freeways). As usual, we hopped into the car on the Friday before Thanksgiving and headed south, starting off in Rainbow Basin, a swatch of BLM land outside of Barstow.
Late on Friday night we pulled into Owl Canyon Campground and picked one of the several empty sites. Sometime since last year this campground has been renovated with new equipment -nice! On Saturday morning we headed down Fossil Bed road towards Black Canyon. Note: Fossil Bed road is a wide, graded, sedan-passable dirt road from Irwin Road to Rainbow Basin. Beyond that it is 4×4/high clearance due to unmaintained washouts, at least when we passed through.
Black Canyon and Inscription Canyon is an area of petroglyphs and rock hounding a bit northwest of Barstow. We spent the morning exploring some incredible petroglyphs and finding some fire opal on the sides of Opal Mountain.
We swang through Barstow for gas and lunch, then headed east along I-15 towards Afton Canyon. There are several interesting things that happen in the short, 6-mile-long Afton Canyon: the Mojave River emerges from beneath the surface and flows through the desert, the railroad shipping lines run between the canyon walls, the historic Mojave Road passes through, and several interesting historical sites are scattered around.
Our plan was to set up camp in the campground at the east end of the Canyon, then drive in along the Mojave Road and check out the many sites I had queued up in my GPS. Unfortunately, the river was high enough to prevent us from crossing in our truck. It was certainly possible we could have made it across in our stock Trailblazer, but being solo we didn’t want to risk it – we probably could have been talked into it by someone with a winch! Instead, we did what we should have done at the beginning – strapped on our daypacks and started off on foot down Afton towards Spooky Canyon. It was 3 pm and seven miles round trip on flat, easy navigable terrain – piece of cake!
Hiking the canyon was fun – we chatted with drivers on the Mojave Road, waved to the train engineers as they passed through, and caught a really colorful sunset. Having run out of daylight, we saved the other canyon sites until the next morning. To be continued in the next entry…
Nice description of some beautiful country. It’s been a while since I’ve been in that particular area. A couple of winters ago I spent a bit of time around Lake Havasu in western Arizona on the Colorado River–beautiful and relatively warm in December.
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Wow, you found opals? That’s really cool!