Monday December 18, 38.8km/24.1mi

Sheephole Valley Wilderness (718.4/2120ft) to Pinto Mountains Wilderness (742.5/2200ft) (CA)

We left camp at 5:50am and immediately headed down into a deep wash. It felt very narrow, especially by the light of our headlamps.

A few minutes later, we stumbled upon a Bighorn sheep skull and horns! Cool.

After a short while, we climbed out of the wash and followed Bighorn sheep trails up and over a couple of little passes. Looking south from the last pass in the Sheephole mountains:

After the passes, we had a nice hour of flat hiking across a plateau…

… before dropping down another wash, and down into this valley.

It was surprisingly cloudy all morning, and it never really warmed up above 55F/13C. Brrr. We crossed the valley, which was like four miles of small sandy dunes. It was easy to navigate, but the soft sand slowed us down.

Just before we crossed the paved highway, the sand increased, and our pace decreased.

After crossing the highway, we hiked another couple of miles, and had lunch next to the dirt road we had been traveling. It still was only 60F/16C and cloudy, so we didn’t stay long. After lunch, there was more nice roadwalking.

As we were crossing over a pass, the clouds started to disperse, and I was actually warm. Hooray!

At the bottom of the pass was some interesting roadside graffiti, though it seemed too old to call it graffiti.

The rest of the afternoon was relaxing roadwalking, on nice firm sandy tracks.

And there was even a bit of cross-country on “desert pavement”, a naturally flat, firm, and relatively smooth gravel surface.

We filled our water bottles at a quail guzzler, enough to take us 14 miles tomorrow to the next guzzler. It was getting dark, but we hiked another 10 minutes, since you’re not allowed to camp near a guzzler. (I wouldn’t want to camp there anyway, all the animals would be visiting the water source all night long.) We setup our tents, and it was surprisingly warm, which was nice. Only three more days until this trail is finished!