Saturday December 9, 39.8km/24.7mi

Stepladder Mountains Wilderness (526.8/1440ft) to Old Woman Mountains Wilderness (551.5/3260ft) (CA)

We left camp at 6:15am and hiked along a dirt road for 3 hours. It was pretty dark for the first 10 minutes with only the glowing orange sky behind me.

Pretty soon it lightened up, and I could see the Old Woman mountains ahead of me to the west.

It was pretty cold maybe 40 F/4C, and rather windy, so I was happy to see the sunlight starting to approach the cold valley.

By 9am it had warmed up, and we had left that dirt road and started a short climb to a small pass.

And soon after we officially entered the wilderness area!

It was so incredibly windy, so even though it was 60F/15C by now, we kept most of our clothing layers on, and walked uphill into the wind.

We went over the top of the little pass and immediately hiked down the other side to get out of the wind. A mile later, we came to our first water source for today, another quail guzzler.

This one had a lid that was non-removable, so we had to get creative and fish water out of the skinny front portal, using a bottle taped to a hiking pole.

Once we had entered the Old Woman mountains, the landscape and geology around us changed noticeably. There were many more yucca plants….

… And much more of this type of rock, that I usually associate with Joshua Tree National Park.

We had lunch near this cool rock formation.

We spent pretty much all day very gradually climbing into these mountains, and now we could look down to the valleys to the north and see how much higher we were.

At the end of the day, there was a series of small but steep passes that we needed to hike over.

There were easier ways to get around these mountains, but instead the route chose to go through some of them. It was slow going and a little unexpected and out of character for this route, but we eventually got through the challenges. Looking down on a wash we were about to descend into:

We hiked in Sweetwater Wash for a couple of miles before it got dark.

After a series of confusing turns and some cross-country travel, we were hiking in the dark for an hour to get to our intended campsite near a water source.

We got to our campsite at 6:30 and promptly setup our tents, since it was getting extremely cold. Fortunately, the wind had stopped! I put on most of my clothing layers and crawled into my sleeping quilt.