Tangential Adventures

After a long but fairly comfortable night of sleep, we got up fairly early and struck our camp. Fueled by an energy bar, and lured by the thought of a hot breakfast back at the car, we set off.  The morning sun felt good, and the skies were much clearer. We retraced our steps relatively uneventfully, and as we were nearing the last stretch of the hike out, J decided we should explore what looked like an old mine up on the hillside. We scrambled up the crumbling remains of an old mining road, and discovered around six old mine shafts in various states from open-but-sketchy, to bricked off, to incomplete. Unarmed with guide books, we speculated about what they might have been mining. Lots of iron-heavy rocks, near some mines, lots of quartz near others. J thought the quartz was a good sign for gold, and it turned out to have been a gold operation that operated from about 1900 to 1938.

A map of our hike out is shown below.  You can actually make out one of the mine shafts, which shows as a dark elongated hole surrounded by lighter colored rock, just north of the “mine” waypoint on the map.

	#	Elevation	Distance	Time	Movingtime	Speed	Movingspeed	Max Speed	Climb Up	Climb Down
	1	903 m	0.000 mi	0s	0s	-	-	-	-	-
	2	998 m	3.454 mi	2h 14m 25s	2h 13m 59s	1.54 mph	1.55 mph	21.58 mph	420 ft	112 ft
Summary			3.454 mi	2h 14m 25s	2h 13m 59s	1.54 mph	1.55 mph	21.58 mph	420 ft	112 ft

We eventually made our way back to the car, and decided to press on and have breakfast elsewhere at a day use site. We had to drive out by finishing a loop of the dirt road, and then driving back up the sketchy part of the Geology Tour Road. We spotted a pair of coyotes on the loop drive, which was cool, since we had seen paw prints on our hike. The loop road was a nice drive, and dumped us back where we expected.

We drove back a bit and stopped at Squaw Tank to check out the funky rocks, and pressed on further up the sketchy road. Things were mostly fine, but I did have to find and use the traction control disabling feature to get out of the loose stuff without the car trying to be smarter than me and cutting the accelerator because the tires were spinning.

We made our way back onto the main road and decided to stop at Split Rock day use area to make some oatmeal and figure out our day’s plan. We were both feeling a bit low blood sugar and probably fried from too much sun exposure, and we needed to be back near civilization for our evening plans, so we decided to be touristy and drive our way out by way of Cottonwood, and stop at a couple of interesting places. This, despite picking on people a bit who “experience the outdoors” from the air-conditioned comfort of their cars.

We stopped for a bit and wandered through the Cholla Cactus garden, which despite being touristy was kind of neat. Pressing on towards the exit, we stopped at Cottonwood Springs and decided to make our other freeze-dried meal from the failed dinner the night before for lunch. We enjoyed it from the shade of a palm tree in the oasis, and rested a bit before pressing on.

From there, we set our course on the GPS to the hotel that we stayed on Tuesday night, hoping to snag a room for the night. It was much pricier on a peak Friday, but it was a known quantity so we went for it.

We lounged around a bit, enjoyed hot showers, and made plans for our final night near LAX. We also thought about various plans for Saturday/Sunday, and leaned towards venturing to the San Jacintos.

Our evening observatory plans were coming closer, so we headed out, stopping at two different equally sketchy liquor stores looking for a bottle of wine to go with dinner.

We had no idea what to expect for the evening, since the observatory was at a private home. We were surprised to find our directions depositing us in a valley city in a gated community. J called the woman as directed, and she ran out to let us in. A little strange, we thought to ourselves…

The “facility” turned out to be in the very fancily landscaped suburban backyard of a couple, who run dining and viewing events four nights a week. Calling it a “hobby gone awry,” our host has a 12 foot rotating/tracking dome with a 14″ tracking scope, with another smaller scope with nicer optics mounted on top. Very impressive for a hobby setup, to be sure.

Dinner, as pre-arranged with our hosts by J, was a gluten-free meal with a salad, tomato/mozzarella/basil, shrimp, chicken, and bruschetta. Everything was tasty, and it felt a little B&Bish as our hosts dined with us and regaled us with tales (nice though they were, more than a bit colored by their own social and political perspectives). Still, after a couple of glasses of wine and dinner, we felt comfortable enough to at least enjoy the experience for what it was. Weird, maybe, but definitely an experience.

After dinner and dessert, we retired to the observatory, and our host showed us about a half dozen objects. We looked at the Pleiades, the Andromeda galaxy, the Orion nebula, several of the numbered Messier objects, and ultimately ended looking at Mars, upon which we could make out the polar ice cap. We then said our goodbyes with the hosts, and J and I exchanged knowing glances as we walked out of their home.

We headed back to our hotel in Desert Hot Springs, and we crashed pretty quickly since it was close to midnight and we had been going to bed at sundown around 6:30 for the previous couple of days.