Tuesday December 19, 36.2km/22.5mi
Pinto Mountains Wilderness (742.5/2200ft) to Joshua Tree NP – Johns Camp (765.0/3880ft) (CA)
We started off hiking in headlamps as usual, but it only lasted like 15 minutes. As soon as we dropped into a wash, there was enough daylight to see.
We hiked up a nice wash all morning, and made pretty good time. After an hour, we passed by another guzzler but it was mostly buried in gravel from the wash.
It seemed like it was built in a bad location, since this would constantly happen every time the wash had water. We continued up the nice wash, and eventually branched off into a smaller and crappier wash. It was very rocky and slow going, and sometimes I even had to dodge some sharp plants. After what felt like forever but was probably only an hour, we climbed up out of the wash and onto a nice broad ridgeline.
The ridge had great views in almost every direction and it was smooth walking on the “desert pavement”.
The view west, towards Joshua Tree National Park:
From there, we descended into another wash and followed that downhill for awhile, before we turned up a side wash and climbed up it for an hour.
After climbing out of that wash we emerged onto another ridge. There was definitely a pattern today! And from that ridge of course, we could see down into the next wash that we would be hiking.
Once we descended into that wash, we stopped and had lunch. There wasn’t much sunshine since it was a little cloudy today, but it was just enough to do some charging on the solar panels. After lunch we followed that very nice wide wash uphill for an hour, and eventually it turned into a road.
The rest of our afternoon was spent hiking uphill on a series of dirt roads, that took us to the boundary of Joshua Tree National Park. From the top of that pass, we could see down into the park.
We followed a park maintenance road down into the main part of the park. Along the way I saw this hilarious sign!
And a few minutes later, we saw it in the namesake flora of the park, the Joshua Tree!
We continued down the park maintenance road, where I think the park employees were having some fun with the road painting machine.
For the last mile of the day, we hiked in a very nice wide wash.
And the sunset looked absolutely stunning from that vantage point.
We didn’t want to camp directly in the wash, since that’s where the cold air settles, so we found a flat grassy bench just above the wash and setup our tents there. Only two more days until the finish!