“It’s alive and waiting for you. Ready to kill you if you go too far. The sun will get you, or the cold at night. A thousand ways the desert can kill”
The Mojave is a desert of wind, temperature extremes, Joshua Trees and solitude. When most people hear the word ‘desert,’ images of tumbleweeds, rattlesnakes and bleak desolation typically come to mind. In reality, the Mojave is anything but a wasteland. Amongst the sand and sagebrush lie many places of beauty and wonder, and of historic importance. Some are the result of time and the elements, some are the result of man and his efforts to live in the Mojave, both in recent and prehistoric times. Let’s go see what we can find.
Raise your hand if you've ever driven by the exit for Zzyzx Road, while speeding along Route 15 on your way to Las Vegas, and wondered at all about that name. I know when I was a kid that name always fascinated me. It was also very useful when you needed an X, Y and Z to finish a game of Alphabet soup.
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Getting to Darwin Falls is kind of a two-part adventure. The first part being the last few miles of the drive to the trailhead. It's a bumpy, rocky road that takes you through some pretty canyons and washes. The second part of the adventure is the hike to the falls, and I enjoyed that a lot more than the first part. Wasn't quite as jarring to my internal organs....
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Ruth Camp is an interesting ghosttown, located approximately 14 miles north of Trona in the Argus Mountain Range. There are a good number of fairly well-preserved buildings that I was able to poke around in, which date from the late 1930s. Most have been vandalized over the years and the contents pretty much trashed, but it was still fun checking them out.
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"PC" for Post Card. I've got a lot of old postcards from the deserts of California and thought I might share a few of them here.
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The Tufa Towers at Mono Lake, another place I'd always wanted to visit after seeing them on an episode of Huell Howser's California Gold. Click HERE to see the episode that inspired me to visit Mono Lake. While I didn't have a Ranger-guided tour as Huell did, I enjoyed exploring the lake at a couple different spots on two different days.
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Established in the early 1860s, Benton was born with the discovery of silver in the nearby Blind Springs Hills and White Mountains. Also known as Benton Hot Springs, the town thrived for a few short years. As is the tale with many mining towns, when the precious ore gave out, so did the town. Folks moved away and buildings were left for nature to reclaim.
Read MoreJoshua Tree National Park, the California Gold Country, forgotten places in the Mojave Desert. These are a few of my favorite things.
