Monty's 2001 Trip to California!

Down to the Desert
A very long drive ...
... and not a very interesting one either. At least not at first.

Originally, I had plans to take my time, to drive back over the Sierra's and take 395 south, exploring along the way. However, as things turned out, between weather concerns and simply not having the time to be leisurely and visit all the folks I wanted to visit, I opted for an early morning start and simply take I-5. Now I five, if compared to say that section of 70 through Nebraska where one could drive for hours without even bothering too look at the ever unchanging road, is in comparison quite nice, but when compared to any other drive in California I-5 is quite definitely the least interesting travel one could hope for. However, it gets one where you want in a hurry. Finally, the Bakersfield exit came up and well, again, not very interesting, but finally the southern California desert was beginning to open up in all it's beauty.

I love the desert. All the exposed geology. All those naked rocks exposing various geomorpholgy -- from extrusive ultramaphic flows of basalt, to rhylotic ash deposits, to granite, to sandstone, and well, lots more...

I was glad I managed to somehow get on the road before 6 am this day. I beat the East Bay rush hour traffic and by early afternoon was stopping for my first photos of the day: Red Rock Canyon State Park. Specifically, Hagen Canyon. Not the most spectacular place I've been to, but it had a charm of it's own.

Not to much further down the road things became much more interesting. Still in the configures of the Red Rock Canyon, there was a road leading to a campground: Red Cliffs Natural Preserve. Intrigued I decided to explore. Glad I did. These cliffs were really cool. I did not spend too much time here exploring since I was still quite far from my final destination, but the gross examination I was able to make suggested that this was the result of various volcanic deposits and sandstones, all weathered, eroded and transformed into fantastic shapes and colors. My favorite was where a section, the size of a small office building, had broken off and was sitting there, precariously tilted and looking like it might fall over at any moment. It has probably been like that for centuries. Finally what looks like just a lot of ash. This stuff is really soft, almost melts in the rain, not that they get much rain out here, but it erodes quickly and is probably quite the mess when it is wet out here ;-)

I did not stay in the Red Rock Canyon long, in fact it was mostly just stopping, stepping out to the car and shooting a couple snapshots then back in. This time of year the sun set's early, about 5:30pm and I still had several hundred miles before I reached where I wanted to be.

The road slowly began to climb. Off in the distance snow covered mountains of the Southern Sierra's stood out in crystal clarity. I now wish I had made notes as to what specific mountains were ahead, but my little map program focuses on roads, not features so I really have no idea what all I was looking at here. Pretty though.

There are a lot of Military bases out here. Lots and lots. Good place to fly jets - no people to complain about the noise, or the occasional problems when a plane crashes I guess. They fly quite close to the ground, and quite fast. I was able to catch this jet as it passed over. I was hoping it would fly right over the sun, but even if it had, capturing it on the slow to respond digital camera would have been nearly impossible. At least I was able to snap this shot ;).

The climb suddenly broke. Below was quite the valley. I brought polarizing filters along for this trip. They really help cut any haze and darken the sky. Adds drama to drama in a photo.

The roads here are a lot of fun to drive. Mostly in that there is no traffic. The occasional car is all one sees. The roads seem to go on forever. One of my favorite things is driving right down the middle of the road. I'm not sure why I like to drive right down the middle of the road, but I do. I guess you could say I take the middle road ;-)

As you can see, I love mountains, snow and puffily white clouds against deep blue sky. Combine those three things and I go nuts with the camera. I took many, many more photos than these few, and selecting which to use was difficult, but I was able to manage to whittle down my selection to these. This was one of those drives where I went down the road about a mile or so, often just a few minutes, stopped the car, got out , took semaphores and then continued on. I'm glad I did not have a passenger. I would have driven them nuts!

The road continued. Now I was getting quite close to some of the smaller mountains. Hills actually, as the road climbed up yet another pass there was a beautiful rock outcropping with a convened pullout. I think that this pullout was not really designed so I could get out and take pictures, but more to help struggling automobiles.

This time of year, the only time of year as far as I'm concerns when it comes to visiting the desert, the air temperature was in the low 60's at the height of the day. In much of the year temperatures of 100+ are common. Make that 100+++ like the time some years ago when I ran down to experience what really hot was just for fun. I was quite disappointed when the air temperature was only 111 degrees, for just previous day it was 127 in the shade.

I do not like hot weather, but I wanted to be able to say I had experienced 127 degrees in the shade. I was quite disappointed it was so much cooler the day I drove down. Oh well.

The road leading down to Stove Pipe Wells is a long decent. Off to the left is another road, one heading south along and then into the mountains. I had never taken this road before and I was going to take it to get to where I was heading, but the sign along the highway clearly stated that the road was closed only a few miles ahead. So, what I decided to do was try the road from the back side. I still had plenty of time so I decided to explore. I'm glad I did.

Remember that big storm that caught us in the Sierra Mountains further north. That was quite the storm and it had carried rain and snow all the way down here to southern California. What was on these mountains was only a few days old, still quite fresh and apparently deep, well, deep enough to close this road.

One of my favorite effects is soft sandstone capped by harder, less erodible, um caprice. Why they call it caprice you see... It caps the rock! Anyway, there is a lot of that here. There is also a lot of uplifting and tilting so that the result is often a sloping caprice such as this.

As this road climbed, it did not take long before there was snow on the ground. There is something about desert in the snow. It is as if there is a natural oxymoron occuring all around. One associates desert with oppressive heat but in reality, desert is not defined by heat, but by evapotranspiration, and by some, average rainfall. Regardless, desert in the snow is quite cool, literally ;[-) Now we had mountains, desert and snow close up! Once again, I took lots and lots of photos, but was pretty good at whittling down the selection...

I kept going, higher and higher, further and further into the mountains. Every few miles was a dirt road (the road I was on was thankfully paved). Each of these roads had an intriguing sign for this or that canyon or other site of interest. Unfortunately they also included the warning of "Four Wheel Drive, High Clearance ONLY!" So I did not even try. That would be perfect to get a little Ford Escort rental car stuck in the middle of nowhere, at night in the winter, in the snow in the desert with no winter gear outside some snow pants and a Wintergreen jacket....

However, I was not good at keeping track of the gas gauge. My little Escort at home gets nearly 38MPG on the highway. I was superseded that this car was only getting about 25mpg. It also had a smaller tank. The result was that I had to fill up every 250 miles or so. That's not too much of a problem in civilization, but out here.... I was on a quarter tank when I took this 17 mile road, and much to my dismay, the little light telling me I was running out of gas came on as I was heading AWAY from Stovepipe Wells... At least the return trip was all downhill....