My plan - if one can ever really have a plan when out adventuring, was that this was going to be my last day on the East Mojave Heritage Trail. After nearly 10 days of travel, I had only 70 miles or so to complete Segment 4, and in an effort to ensure that I'd actually get through those 70 miles before dark, I was out of the tent nearly half an hour before the sun peeked over the horizon. With no shadows, the ambient light on the Turtle Mountains was something special. The main reason I was up so…
5 CommentsTag: rock art
Whereas @mrs.turbodb was most looking forward to being in the ocean while we were in the tropics, I was most looking forward to seeing an active volcano. Actually, I suppose I was conceptually interested in that, but I hadn't fully thought through two key elements: (1) where to go to see said active volcano and (2) whether there was actually an active volcano. Turns out, (1) is a problem when the answer to (2) is "there isn't one." I so sad. Still, even if we couldn't see some fiery hot lava blasting into the night sky, or cascading into the…
4 Comments
After cleaning up after dinner and getting the tent deployed, it was still only 6:15pm, too early - even for us - to hit the sack for the night. It was, rather, the perfect time for me to be reminded of what we had in store for the morning; the trail description I'd neglected to re-read prior to planning the trek. Whipping out what we lovingly refer to as the Mojave Preserve bible - @mrs.turbodb was happy to oblige: From its head near the highest point in the Granite Mountains to its mouth, Budweiser Canyon climbs about 2,800 feet in…
4 Comments
There was no way Mike @Digiratus, Zane @Speedytech7, and I were going to run the entirety of the East Mojave Heritage Trail when we set out to do it at the end of November. At something more than 700 miles long - not including the nearby side-adventures that I added for our enjoyment - it might seem like a Backcountry Discovery Route, but the roads are significantly slower and more technical, and the percentage of on-dirt miles is significantly larger. Frankly, these two things make it easily twice the length of a BDR, not to mention the fact that we…
6 Comments
I don't know if it was the coldest night of the trip from an absolute perspective, but when I climbed out of my tent, it was the only morning I found the rainfly - and the cab of the Tacoma - covered in a layer of frost. Luckily, as the final full day of our trip, we'd decided that no matter where we were, it was where we were going to cook our shared breakfast. And that meant we'd have a couple extra hours for our tents to defrost. While I waited for Mike @Digiratus and Zane @Speedytech7 to wake…
6 Comments
There aren't many nights that I close up all the windows and doors on my tent, as - especially when there is a full moon as there was on this night - I enjoy being able to gaze out on the surroundings if I wake up in the middle of the night. But parked under the watchful gaze of Easter Island Rock, with temperatures in the my-feet-are-numb range and a 10mph breeze blowing through camp, I zipped everything up tight, inserted my earplugs, and hoped for the best. It worked, and I was nice and toasty when my alarm -…
8 Comments
Prologue For the first time in five years, the "annual" TacomaWorld trip has morphed into two trips. I suppose, technically, I should call it a trip-and-a-half, given the debacle that became Half a Trip in Montana, but I prefer to see the glass always full (there's always something in there) so we're just going to call it two. The timing of the second trip - in December - clearly ruled out anything up north, so returning to Montana for redemption would just have to wait until next year. Plus, given the unexpectedly good time that we had in Death Valley…
17 Comments
Our exit from Big Rocks Wilderness after lunch on Thursday gave us only a few hours in the afternoon -- and a couple hours the following morning - before heading to Las Vegas for our $27 flights home on Spirit Airlines. How Spirit can provide flights for so little money is beyond me, but it has made the decision to leave the Tacoma in Las Vegas even easier - for the cost of a single tank of gas, both of us can fly roundtrip, saving 40 hours of travel time in the process - on the ends of a trip.…
7 Comments
The Pahranagat Valley and its surrounding wilderness' have been my nemesis throughout 2023. I set out in January - nearly a year ago now - to follow the Pahranagat Trail in search of rock art that I'd discovered through the trip reports of other intrepid explorers. Ultimately - and luckily, quickly - I realized that without more information, I was searching for a needle in a haystack, so I headed east and south - to Utah and Arizona - where I discovered some of the most amazing rock art that I was not looking for. Strike one. Determined to succeed…
12 Comments
One of the dots I'd hoped to connect on our trip through Nevada was hiking to the top of Boundary Peak in the White Mountains. Boundary is an interesting peak. Appropriately, it sits on a boundary - the state line between Nevada and California. At 13,147 feet, it's the highest peak in Nevada. And hilariously, along the same ridgeline - less than a mile away, and just across the California border - Montgomery Peak rises 298 feet above Boundary Peak, yet Montgomery Peak does not rank amongst the top 100 of California's highest peaks. Sounded like the perfect peak to…
16 Comments
Stage 4 of the Utah Backcountry Discovery Route - through Nine Mile Canyon (sort of), and through the Uinta Mountains to ... Wyoming? Shortly after 6:00pm, we pulled out of the Chevron station on the outskirts of Wellington on our way to Nine Mile Canyon. We were surprised when we discovered that Nine Mile Canyon was on the Utah BDR because when we'd visited - a little more than a year earlier - we'd spent an entire day in the canyon, completely overdosed on rock art, and still hadn't seen but a fraction of what it has to offer. How…
1 Comment
Stage 3 of the UTBDR - from Moab to the Book Cliffs to the San Rafael Swell. Pulling away from Dewey Bridge a little after 6:30pm, we'd already been on the road for 12 hours and we were spent. Unfortunately - as long as we wanted to continuing making forward progress on the route - there was no real elevation to be found until the beginning of the following stage, and we knew there was no way we could make it that far, even if we drove long into the darkness. So, we resolved to keep an eye out for…
7 Comments
Lockhart Basin in our rearview mirror, it was time for the main Stage 2 route through the La Sal Mountains. Having wrapped up our brief time in town with a quick meal and a refreshingly cold Coke - kept icy cold in my favorite stainless steel vacuum cup - and chocolate frosty from Wendy's - it was time to find some respite from the heat. A hotel room - with a shower - for instance. Sure, it wasn't triple digits anymore, but no one wants to sleep in this, either. Alas, there was no hotel room in our future, though…
5 Comments
Before running the official stage 2 route, we were headed to the alternate (red), a more difficult trail through Lockhart Basin. Of all the stages on the Utah BDR, I was most looking forward to the expert route through Lockhart Basin. This stretch of road piqued my interest for a couple reasons: first, it skirts along the edge of Canyonlands National Park, an area that never ceases to amaze me, no matter which district I happen to be visiting at any given time. Second, it was a segment of the M~U~D trip that Monte @Blackdawg and Mike @Digiratus ran back…
2 Comments
The first stage of the UTBDR meanders - like the San Juan River - through some of Utah's most recognizable landscape. It's hard to say that it was way too early when my alarm went off at the base of Mexican Hat, but it's safe to say that we'd gotten way too little sleep given our arrival at this place only three hours earlier. Still, with daytime temperatures in the triple digits, we were no dummies - though one might argue otherwise given our voluntary arrival to such conditions - and planned to get as many miles in while it was still…
4 Comments
A few months ago, I headed to Nevada in search of several rock art sites along the Pahranagat Trail. After starting out with a bang in Arrow Canyon, my search in the South Pahroc Wilderness was a total flop, as I didn't find any rock art at all! After popping into the local BLM office for some tips - which they couldn't share - I aborted my plan altogether for an alternate, ultimately amazing, itinerary. Returning home, I had a "brilliant*" idea. Like many other Americans, I watch and read a bit of news here and there, and one of…
16 Comments
With the warmer weather finally making its way north, and the Tacoma at home for a bit of maintenance after the last several months of living in Las Vegas, @mrs.turbodb and I thought that it would be fitting to mark the anniversary of our very first trip in the Tacoma by visiting the Owyhee. We wouldn't explore exactly the same spots - we rarely do - but we'd find ourselves in wonderfully similar surroundings, the fleeting green grass of spring welcoming us back. This time we decided to explore the Idaho side of this amazing wilderness, setting off on a warm…
9 Comments
Where was I? Oh right, I'd just completed an 11-mile hike before lunch in order to avoid the weekend crowds that never developed - at least, as far as I could tell. Still, I was left - in one of the most beautiful places in our country - with half a day to explore; the only thing standing in my way was figuring out where to go! Ultimately, I only seriously considered two options. The first - having just hiked the South Fork of Mule Canyon - was to hike the North Fork. I had almost no info on it…
6 Comments
Just as I was nodding off after a peaceful day of hiking Road Canyon, I realized that it was Friday night - a fact that was interesting only in that it meant that the following day was Saturday. Now, bear with me because I'm going to spend entirely too much time making this point. You see, Saturday itself wasn't all that interesting, rather, it was the fact that it was a weekend. And even the fact that it was a weekend wasn't very interesting, except for the fact that I'd planned to hike the South Fork of Mule Canyon -…
5 Comments
I was pooped when I climbed into the tent on the edge of the West Fork of Johns Canyon. A full day of hiking (I'd covered more than 16 miles), after only a few hours of sleep (about five), meant that I knocked out a full three minutes of reading before my eyes closed and my thumb stopped "turning pages" of Tom Clancy's Red Winter. Sleep was bliss. I'm not sure I woke up at all before the soft charm of my alarm - a little diddy that everyone probably knows from YouTube survey ads that play before videos but…
10 Comments