Essex To Painted Rock
Sorry for the delay in getting the second half of our Essex trip up. It's a big update with lots of pics:
....After we made our way through the little desert town of Essex, California, we headed out into the desert. We were headed for the Old Woman Mountains and then south across the Mojave till we hit the highway (HW62) on the other side.
The backside of beautiful Essex:
We crossed the desert and passed by a small corral of penned up desert cattle:
They didn't look too happy being out in the blazing sun, but they had plenty of water and we had seen a Cowboy out there rounding them up, so they weren't just left and forgotten. As we headed deeper into the desert the terrain got totally wild:
We crossed a few small ravines and valleys till we found a good campsite for the night. It was sheltered and had plenty of firewood. We slept on the ground beside the jeep "cowboy style":
It was right near one of our objectives, Painted Rock. This is a huge boulder by a cave that the Indians had covered with petrogylphs centuries ago. It took a bit of "dead reckoning" but we finally found it out there in the middle of the wilderness. It's the big boulder in the foreground:
And here's the small cave tucked away behind it. We didn't look for pottery or arrowheads, but I'm sure there are tons of them. I wonder what went on here hundreds of years ago?
The petrogylphs were faint but still visible:
We then headed out across the open mojave, following some powerlines that led back to the highway some sixty miles away. In the distance you can see the white salt flats where they still manufacture salt by evaporating it in huge shallow ponds and then loading it aboard tanker trains:
And here's one of the tanker trains parked on a side track out in the middle of the desert. If you stood next to it, you could hear the rails creak as the sun heated the metal. At first we thought it was another train coming, but there was nothing to be seen for miles and miles.
After that, we followed the train tracks back to the highway and sped back to 29 Palms and Joshua Tree, getting home just in time for a nap and then cocktails on the back porch! Another excellent desert adventure!!!
DB
Posted: Thursday 18th May 2006, 2:48 PM
Back to the Blog