After a couple nights in Borrego Springs (due to the heavy snow closure of roads to Julian), laundry done, camper & truck cab cleaned up and re-provisioned we headed into the desert mountains to find a fine secluded, quiet, dark sky camping spot and lucked into it. It was nice to set off early for a hike in Palm Canyon on a trail along a spring feed stream up into a grove of palm trees. Just an hour and a half hike when the air was still cool. Then drive for only an hour or two and set up camp. From here we head to Joshua Tree?
3/4/23
And we did. It is Saturday night as I type this (3/4) and both Joshua Tree and 29 Palms were loaded with people so we moved on on route 62 east to a wilderness area called Sheep Hole Valley. "Nothing here” but immense open space desert so as the sun sets behind the mountain range the shadow can be 30 miles long. There is a mining camp (gold) about 10 miles into the desert we can see as tiny as a dot. Still can’t grog the scale of distance here… like ocean the desert has no references. A mountain can be so much further away then thought. Unaccustomed to desert camping it has taken time to adjust the mindset of what is safe. Being from a forested place one seeks a den to hide in. But here it is not possible. There are arroyo’s and some small rock formations but mostly its just you out there in the open,. From where you stand it seems exposed. Walk a half mile away and look back and it takes time to find yourself! You are hidden in the scale. You are a dot.
Like us and in Carl Sagan’s “A small blue dot”…. or as my mechanical drawing 8th grade teacher in Lynn said to us… “you are all just a pimple on a horse’s ass” …. yea not gonna win teacher of the year award but it has stuck with me. (Mr D’Angello… he was coming into the teaching thing after some hard life stuff..we kids could tell… so we gave him space). So wide open spaces means wind… gusts and buffeting for hours … then what wakes you is the calm.
Tomorrow we head east again into AZ perhaps as far as Sedona. Heard good things about the area but have a funny feeling it might be ”too peoplely”. I know what awaits for us after the crossing the Mississippi River…. so I want to enjoy as much space between ‘us’ as possible
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