April 2017 Desert Trip

Olivia and I left work a little early to try and beat traffic around LA to get to the Mojave National Preserve (which we did) as I have a little spot there that I like to camp at because it's very isolated, well when we got there it was taken which was surprising because it's way off the beaten path and I've never seen anyone there before now.....Oh well so we moved on further north into the park looking at other spots I have mapped out and holy crap the place was freakin packed we couldn't find anywhere! And our intention was to only sleep in Mojave and move on because Mojave doesn't interest me much, it's too crowded and just not that spectacular but alas we found a place to camp at the end of a small dirt road that backed up to the ecological study site.

As we're sitting around the fire a white tacoma with a flippac comes up the road sees us and turns around no big deal, well about 30 minutes later he comes back and sets up pretty close to us in a spot I didn't really think was a good place but whatever so we head into the flippac to read and go to bed. Well the guy had kids who were all fired up and started yelling and going crazy which is not very conducive to a good nights sleep and combined with the strong winds we did not sleep well (although the FP handles wind much better than my old ARB tent did!). We woke up in the morning to someone circling around my truck which really startled my gf so I look outside and there is like 6 new trucks parked around our area with kids and dogs just going nuts barking and screaming so we packed up and left. Needless to say I won't be going back to Mojave probably ever again and is another big reason I almost always avoid national parks and preserves, BLM and National Forests are the only way to go for me.

The group of people....

Exploring around our site before taking off on Saturday morning, and you may notice some of my photos have this weigh darker top or area in the photo and that was not intentional I brought a Sony A7Sii with a metabones lens adapter and it was giving me some really funky results.

After leaving Mojave we headed to Lake Havasu to do a little swimming and scout out a spot I mapped out to camp along the Colorado river and I managed to finally catch a desert iguana, these guys are normally very hard to actually catch by hand! 

Now we didn't end up staying at the camp on the river because of wind, there were gusts of over 30mph and it just wasn't gonna be worth it so we headed south to an old favorite of mine. This is a spot that I've been to many times and will go to this exact spot when it's windy because it's in a wash that has high walls that protect you from the wind, we slept great this night! Not to mention there is never anyone around which is another reason I enjoy it so much.

We spent all of Sunday looking for reptiles and wildflowers/cactus, we came across many different species but I didn't keep my camera on me so I either don't have any photos of them or just crappy cell phone pics (my bad).

We followed this road all the way into and over those mountains to the back side and then out back towards home and along the way we saw some pretty interesting stuff including old mines, abandoned cars, hawks nests and lots of desert iguanas and flowers!

Once out of the wash we took an old mining road that lead up and over the mountain and the last section ended up being more tight and technical than we planned but it was an awesome drive that also takes you through some cool slot type canyons (sorry no flexy pics it was towards the end of the trip and we were just enjoying the drive).

And that's about it, felt great to be back out in the desert and am planning on getting back out here at least once more before it gets too hot to go!