The third day of our Thanksgiving trip was spent in the southern end of Mojave National Preserve, exploring some fun rock formations and old mining sights. The Sheep Corral is…
I'm going to use the theme of "Throwback Thursday" to start revisiting some trips I never got around to writing about. First up is an exploration of the Surprise Tank Petroglyphs…
We kicked off Thanksgiving week with a tour of an area northwest of Barstow known as the Black Mountain Area of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC). This is a fascinating BLM…
Occasionally, I travel to Germany for work. My office is about an hour south of Frankfurt, but I always prefer to stay a bit north of the office in a…
I’ve been in California for fourteen years, and until now Gold Country was simply something standing between me and the mountains. We’d drive through quaint old west towns on our way to the high country, and I’d always tell myself that one day we’d come back to explore. Last weekend was finally the time for that exploration. Over two days, we drove from Sonora to Auburn via the historic highway 49. Along the way we learned a lot about the history of California’s gold rush, explored antique shops, stayed in a ‘haunted’ hotel, and spent a night on the town in one of the bigger remaining cities along the route.
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Continuing our trend of summiting infrequently climbed peaks, we took off Monday morning to hike Shadow Mountain. The route began from our camp area at the Shadow Mountain Mine and followed old mining roads and eventually the southwest ridge to the summit. It is a rather small and insignificant peak compared to its neighbors Kingston and Clark, and that combined with the bad roads make it a rarely visited summit.
To start out, we followed an old road past the mill building ruins and machinery pads and into the hills that flank Shadow Mountain. We could have driven most of this road, but a large washout about 1/4 mile past the mine site blocked progress by vehicle. No problem – we don’t mind walking!
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The bright sunny Sunday morning that we were hoping for didn’t materialize exactly as planned, but the clouds had cleared enough for us to get a peek at our objective for the day, Kingston Peak, and we didn’t like what we saw. Behind the ridges the higher rocky peaks were coated in a fair amount of snow. The last part of the route up Kingston is scrambling around rock, and none of us were eager to do that in icy or potentially deep snow conditions. Luckily we had come prepared with a nearby alternate: the high point of the Mesquite Mountain range.
I always enjoy visiting the desert during the week of Thanksgiving since the weather is usually so perfect for the activities we enjoy. Instead of the oppressive heat that is normally associated with such a place, the temperatures tend to hang around the 60s during the day and 30s at night. Sometimes a little colder, sometimes a little warmer, but overall it makes for comfortable hiking and climbing weather during the day, and nothing that a good campfire and jacket can’t handle in the evening. Every once in a while we get a bit of a sprinkle or snow, but hey, it’s the desert, and it likes to stay dry.
Driving into the Turquoise Mountains
Well, this year we headed out right as a big weather system moved through the area. The forecast kept changing, but overall it looked like the rain would move out of the area by Saturday mid-day. We headed out from San Jose and met up with our friend Robin around 9 am on Saturday in Baker. It was foggy and drizzly, but we decided to charge on with our plans: exploring the Turquoise Mountains, a small range on the north side of highway 15 between Baker and the CalNeva border.
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By Friday morning we knew we had to start working our way back home. But we didn’t want to leave Zion without at least one more hike! We chose Observation Point since it was one of the few canyon hikes that we hadn’t yet done.
The Observation Point trail starts at the Canyon bottom at the Weeping Rock trailhead. It climbs 2500 ft in a little under 4 miles to an outcropping on the rim of the canyon. A handful of switchbacks climb to the junction with the Hidden Canyon trail before continuing up to Echo Canyon. We had hiked this trail in the past, so everything beyond the junction would be new to us.
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