DWTH Day 52: Post-Holing in Sand & The Last Food Cache

Stats

Morning In The Mountains

We awoke as the stars faded. A bright orange hue overtook the horizon, and a Costa’s Hummingbird said hello. 

After we packed up, we did one more low pass before following some drainages to a very old 2-track. 

We’ve been seeing the footprints of a person two weeks ahead of us, and we know the shoe tread well. For the first time, though, we saw the footprints of the person one month ahead of us. 

It really makes you think about how your footsteps can matter in arid, desert environments. 

Sad Remains

Before we fully plunged out of the mountains through a drainage, we accidentally started down a different one. However, we noticed quickly and were about to course-correct when Karma saw something. 

He found the shell of a desert tortoise, which we had searched for the whole route to no avail. However, when we found the shell, we saw just how camouflaged they can be. 

Apparently, some of their main predators (besides human development) are large numbers of ravens. Ravens can flip them and quickly peck through their under shell and kill them. 

We left the shell where it was and went back to the route. 

A Rocky Descent into Sand Post Holing

The tire took us down a rocky drainage to cross the next valley. 

The rocks slowed us down a bit, but not outrageously. Bits of old mining roads helped occasionally. 

Then, we had to just cross-country hike across the valley to a 4WD track on the other side of Twenty-Nine Palms Highway. 

This seemed easy until we somehow post-holed into a zillion animal holes. 

Sometimes, you could see them and avoid them. Other times, you just sank out of nowhere. Most times, it only sank 2-4 inches. However, one time, I went in up to my mid-shin. 

Needless to say, I was happy to do this section in the late morning and not the afternoon heat. 

The Last Cache

We got to and unburied our last food cache just in time for lunch. We had no problems with this cache other than the sand, which had been really easy to dig in, so we buried it deeper. It took us a bit longer than usual to find it in the ground. 

Unfortunately, we didn’t pack as many treats as usual for sitting there. 

However, we thoroughly enjoyed a cache meal and a cold, caffeinated canned beverage. 

I got online to get a Joshua Tree National Park backcountry permit. Figuring out all the permit stuff is utterly exhausting. Luckily, Snapper helped us out and wrote me a long Insta message with all the small, nitpicky things figured out. 

Huge shout out to Snapper for trail magic-ing us twice AND helping figure out permits!

We paid $6 to rec.gov for the “free” permit. FYI, rec.gov is NOT a government, park-run website. That $6 processing fee goes into some dude’s pocket, not back into the parks. 🤬

Up into Different Mountains

After resupplying ourselves, we walked up a 4WD rock toward new mountains—at least new to our journey. 

It looked like a big off-roading area to mostly old mines. I’ve noticed the OHV community and mining seem to go hand in hand. 🤔

One current mining claim was posted on our way up. It was accompanied by a lot of metal trash, like old chairs and a table. It seems as though current miners don’t practice LNT, either. 🤨

Camp

On our way to find a campsite, we passed a guy with two well-behaved dogs. He waved and said hi, and we waved back.

He recognized us as hikers (something Californians seem better at than Arizonans). Something else he said stuck with us: “I just drove in from that way to explore, and if you’re hiking, I know you’re going a long way!”

We laughed and said just over toward JTree and Yucca Valley. When he seemed impressed, we left it there, not wanting a full discussion. 

We went until sunset and eventually found a reasonable campsite without a bunch of broken glass. 

We passed on two that looked like too much effort to move all the broken bottle pieces.