On our last full day in the Mojave we visited the Cow Cove petroglyphs in the northern end of the park. This is an amazing collection of petroglyphs and this was our second visit to them (last year’s visit). You can wander the rock piles for hours and hours, discovering all kinds of abstract images [...]
The day after Thanksgiving we needed a good hike to help burn off some off that delicious dinner. Sure, we’d bagged two peaks on Thanksgiving Day, but I’m pretty sure they only covered the turkey and mashers. I still had stuffing and pie to burn off. So after our morning coffee we decided to head [...]
Early Thanksgiving morning, David and I left the Vegas strip for the Mojave desert. We met up with Sooz, Robin, and Gordon at 9 am to hike Table Top mountain, a striking mesa-like peak in the heart of Mojave National Preserve. Like the majority of desert peaks there is no established trail to the top [...]
After three nights and four days in the backcountry it was time to pop back into civilization for food and showers so we headed to Vegas. We usually break up our Thanksgiving trip with a night or two in Vegas and this time we spoiled ourselves with a hot tub room. Although Vegas can be [...]
Many times we have driven south out of Death Valley and passed the signs for China Ranch Date Farm, but it took us until 2009 to stop. We had spent the previous night at a wonderful old miner’s cabin in Death Valley and were working our way towards Las Vegas to get some fresh food [...]
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 [...]


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