DWTH Day 49: Washes, A Bighorn Sheep Path, & A Cache

Stats:

A Day Filled With Washes

We awoke and started our normal morning routine, and then we got to it. 

Since we started on a low pass of sorts, we took a wash down and out to i40. 

Yes, we are re-crossing i40 and now going full south. It was a great horseshoe-shaped hiking week! It was our last interstate crossing. 🥳

After crossing, we meandered through multiple washes and went from the Old Dad Mountains to the Bristol Mountains. 

The Good Old Avoid-Private-Property-Cross-Country

You can always tell when BT is avoiding private property. Suddenly, the cross-country paths he’s sending us through don’t make as much sense. It’s as if the terrain wants you to do something different, and you’re going against it. 

Thus, we end up going on a few more low, relatively easy passes and eventually pop out onto a pipeline road. 

We decided to listen more to podcasts and audiobooks today. We needed to make some the miles to our cache this evening because we buried a large battery pack there. If we could get in early, it would give us a better opportunity to change everything overnight. 

More and More Wildflowers

As we descended more in elevation, the wildflowers came out like crazy. It was one of the only things slowing us down on the way to cache treats. 

The desert bluebells are a bright popping purple, and we found some Emory’s Daisies, more Notch-Leafed Scorpion Weed, and a few more new ones. 

All that rain California got is paying it back with wildflowers!

A Bighorn Sheep Path

Ahead on the map, we saw a waypoint that said “exposure.” I looked through the other notes and saw we’d follow a sheep path for quite a while. The bighorn sheep are far more surefooted than humans, so sometimes, following their paths requires some caution. 

It intrigued us enough that we went for it. The trail made by the sheep actually held up great. The part with exposure was only for a few steps, and the steps were good…just narrow. But it was an area to pay attention to and not space out. 

They took us straight to some water, which provided excellent bird watching. It seemed like one Costa’s Hummingbird had all the control, and the Lesser Goldfinches all bowed to it. The hummingbird got the highest perches and dominated whenever the lesser goldfinches tried to take a higher perch. 

Down to the Cache

I’d love to say we cruised down to our cache, but it was a slow walk. We had some 4WD roads for the last few miles. However, they had so many rocks that it wasn’t as fast as it could have been. 

We still managed to get to our cache before dark, unbury it, find a spot nearby to camp, and fortify the tent with rocks as the wind picked up. 

One of the 3 gallons seemed to have a tiny leak in it somewhere. While Karma got the bucket out, I immediately poured its contents into our empty bottles so we didn’t lose it overnight. 

We exploded our packs and sorted the cache inside the tent as we started our charging fest. This was one of the first caches we put in, so it had been in the ground (in the winter) for 3 months before we got to it. It’s fairly impressive that the battery pack still had 92%!

Train White Noise, Camp, and Cache

Our lovely friend, the train ran within a mile of our camp. 

This line seems to be one of the more active lines, and we generally try to avoid being near it, even in the van. Tonight, however, we should be tired enough that it should just be white noise.