Desert Trails

Happy Valentines Day everyone! We celebrated with coffee at our site and I made Ken a valentine from note paper... cute huh....

Down the road towards Twenty-Nine Palms our first stop will be breakfast (and not at the Saloon..). Our route will take us further into the Mojave Desert today. We travelled through the Morongo Valley and over part of the Little San Bernadino mountains through rolling hills on Rte 247 N. The Bullion Mountain Range on our left provides beautiful views while the USMC Training Center is located in the valley below. There are lots of desert buggys going by on trailers covered from top to bottom with mud and dirt. Off Road Vehicle Recreation is very big out here. We are seeing alot of motorhomes with OHV's pulled behind them. They camp in the desert for the weekend and ride. Looks like the more dirt the better!

Driving across the Mojave you can't get over how immense it is. Looking to our right the desert spreads as far as the eye can see. The road winds along the base of the Little San Bernadinos and the desert floor is covered with Creosote Bush and Mesquite. The Creosote give the floor a dark olive/brown color.

Further on the landscape changes and most plants disappear. We are driving across the bed of Lake Lucerne. Rte 247 goes right through the middle of the lake. It's a big mud hole in the middle of the desert! Ranches, ramshacle shacks, broken motor homes dot the landscape at the foot of the rugged brown mountains tinged with spring green as Rte 274 winds between. We've climbed to 3500 feet and as we look over the hill there is a beautiful valley spread before us. As we decend into the valley the Pisqah Crater and lava flow is on our right.Where the other mountains are light brown these are a charcoal color. The Pisgah Volcano is the youngest vent in the Lavic Lake volcanic field. Activity at this site may be as recent as 2,000 years ago, but experts think it more likely to have been 20,000 to 50,000 years.

Turning onto Interstate 15 S in Barstow and then onto Rte 58 the road begins as a freeway and then changes back and forth between 2 lanes and then 4 lanes. We pass Edwards Air Force Base and across Rogers Dry Lake. Further up the road we see pyramid shape mounds of dirt and rock in the middle of the plains. It looks like they were pushed up from underground.

Soon we rolled into the town of California City and the Sierra Trails Campground which will be our stop for the next 2 nights. Most of these parks have a lot of full time residents. We settled in and took a ride into town. California City is a small place with very hard working people. We stopped at the grocery to pick up a couple of things (like Hostess Cup Cakes for Ken) and then went back to camp.

Today we saw great scenery and just enjoyed the differences between home and the desert.