We're having a bit of a heat wave. So this morning I said "fuckit," loaded up the Jeep, and ascended to the highest local elevation for a nice day of hiking and wheeling. It was only 74 degrees over 9,000 feet up, hooray! Whenever I go off into the wilderness, I always overpack. One day's planned journey means I bring provisions for an accidental overnight, enough food for a day or longer, and enough water for at least 3 days. Because shit happens, and when it does, I will be prepared. So today... I forgot my tools. And something broke. OOPS! But I improvised and made it, whatever. Here are a few photos:
Entrance to one of the trails I found. The sign said
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate so I turned around and hiked a different one.
You can't tell because my cell phone camera is atrocious, but this was the sun behind a cloud. It was still perfectly round and visible. Since the cloud was quite thick, I got to enjoy staring at the sun for 30 seconds straight without going blind. That was neat.
This picture is next to a glorious field that I found and stared at for probably 15 minutes. I didn't photograph that part, because I really wasn't in the mood. But I then wondered, where does this road lead to? Only the mysterious Cthulhujeep knows...!
I found a remote road that lead to Onyx Peak in hopes of finding a really cool view but instead there was a giant radio tower, or whatever this thing is. Still kind of nifty I suppose. I was in the middle of nowhere and some dude in a kilt was up there. He was not very talkative. The view was nice, it overlooked Yucca Valley, the little town where I grew up. I didn't photograph that because I was too busy enjoying the moment (and eating a fig bar).
Not shown: the really fucking strange trail I hiked that appeared to have been flooded recently. About halfway down (it was all downhill) I started thinking "this is gonna hurt on the way up, I should turn around..." but I didn't do that until I found some very large animal footprints. And then I found two absolutely massive trees. One was felled, the other standing proud. Utterly huge! I couldn't even see their entirety from where I stood. That was certainly today's finest glory.