After Saturday’s visit to Fossil Falls, Cerro Gordo, and the U2 tree we didn’t have a lot of light to find our campsite outside of Death Valley. We like to primitive backcountry car camp in the BLM lands outside the park since there are fewer restrictions (i.e. we can cook over a campfire with the [...]
I’ve been meaning to visit Cerro Gordo for a long time and it was with great excitement that we turned up the dreaded road on Saturday afternoon. I have heard that the road condition is anywhere from an easy Sunday drive to a 4WD nightmare. Truthfully, the answer lies somewhere in between, depending on the [...]
On Wednesday we will be leaving on a backpacking trip that will have us above 10k for six days, so we decided to head to the mountains this past weekend and get in some hiking and sleeping at altitude. Our Saturday goal was to hike the duo of Sonora and Stanislaus peaks, a 12 mile [...]
Today was a planned half-day of hiking, about seven miles down down down into Kern Canyon and the hot spring. The Kern river is a nice place to relax and fish, so we were looking forward to our afternoon off and started off the morning at a leisurely pace. I think we were the last [...]
On the northern side of Anza Borrego there are the remains of an old calcite mine. In operation around WWII, they mined optical calcite for use in gunsights. It didn’t last long, since around the same time a synthetic alternate was discovered, making the mining of calcite financially no longer feasible. What is left are [...]

As part of our trip to the desert we decided to join the Southern California 4×4 Geocachers on a run. The target was the Dale Mining District, just north of Joshua Tree, and the run was suitable for our stock 4×4 (though it pushed its limits at times!) The district has a huge number of [...]
Our last full day of the annual Thanksgiving Trip to the desert was an adventure! We decided to do the run up Warm Springs canyon into Butte Valley, but instead of continuing through the valley and up towards Mengel Pass, we turned off towards Arrastre Springs to explore that area. The day was primarily spent [...]


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