Desert Weekend!

Sara gave me a new map for Christmas. It's a Tom Harrison Map of the San Diego Backcountry. It has all kinds of places that I've never been to, and that drove me nuts. This weekend, I finally did something about it. Mark and I set out to go see an abandoned Stage Coach Station near Carrizo Marsh and the Goat Canyon Railroad Trestle. It turns out that we had so much fun discovering other stuff we totally forgot why we went to the desert in the first place. Here's how it went...

DAY ONE

We threw our stuff in the truck, headed east on the I-8 into the land of illegal aliens, Indian Casinos, and windmill farms...

Pretty soon we were in open country, enjoying a clear, crisp winter day.

Our plan was to head out into the wilderness via "Canyon sin Nombre" where we heard there was a particularly nice slot canyon.

Entering Canyon sin Nombre

Mark's guidebook said the best slot canyon was about 1.3 miles in on the western side...

..and there it was! +1 for the guidebook!

We wound around in the canyon for about a 1/2-mile. When we finally reached the top, it spit us out at the edge of a cliff overlooking the Canyon sin Nombre, which we had just driven through.



View from the top of the slot canyon

Our next planned stop was the Carrizo Stage Station. We reached the Vallecitos Wash and headed east. To our dismay, we found that the road, rather than going around the marsh, went right through it.



Although the Tacoma did its best, we were a little reluctant to risk getting stuck in the mud with darkness and 30-degree temps approaching. So much for the stage station!

We headed west, back up the Vallecitos wash, and ended up making a dusk run through Seco del Diablo in search of a good campsite. We set up camp just off the 4x4 trail north of the canyon. We didn't have much firewood, but managed to set up a cheery blaze anyway!

After settling in for the night, I got to try out my new Thermarest pad, which was awesome! (I owe Sara's mom many thanks for a great Christmas present!) From our campsite, we saw only three man-made lights, way out in the distance. This place was really remote!

DAY TWO

Mark and I slept, and slept, and then, since the desert was so calm, and the sun so warm, we slept some more. After breaking camp, we took in the view one last time...

...and drove back into "Seco del Diablo" in search of a few promising-looking slot canyons we saw the night before.



About half-way through the canyon we found what we were looking for...

Up this modest-looking canyon is a maze of nearly innumerable slot canyons, caves, trenches, and impassible badlands. We spent so long exploring the place we had to abandon our plan to see the Goat Canyon trestle. Oh well, this was WAY better!



That was 5 hours of the best slot canyon exploring I've ever done! And that was just ONE of the canyons we could have looked at!

All hese canyons and tunnels are made from sandstone and silt, like this.


KUDOS FOR MARK'S TRUCK

The truck did great this weekend! It took us through sandy canyons, dirt roads, paved roads, and even snow!

This guy had twice as many cylinders, and twice as many drive wheels as Mark's truck, but he still got stuck where we just drove straight through!

Yup. That was a good weekend!