Memorial Holiday Desert Weekend

We needed to find somewhere warm with water to swim in to escape the artic like storms that had been hitting CA at the time so a couple of friends and I started hashing out a plan on where to go over what would normally be a very packed holiday weekend.

Andy, Anna, Ben, Olivia and I were all leaving and coming from different places so we set a meeting point out in the Mojave National Preserve that would be not too far off the road and hard to find for the ones coming in late at night. Olivia and I got there first so we set up and hiked around looking for wildlife and taking in the beauty of the surrounding desolation, as evening fell we made a quick dinner of tri-tip tacos and waited for Andy and Anna to show up. The campfire was roaring as we watched the stars come into view and before we knew it the second part of our crew showed up so we sat and talked as the fire grew dim and eventually out. But before we went to bed I noticed something strange off in the distance, something I’ve never seen before so I asked Olivia “Hey do you see that line of lights out there?'“ she responded “Yea I’ve been trying to figure out what the hell that is.” What we were seeing was a perfect line of lights above the horizon all moving at the exact same slow speed across the skyline, after maybe 45 seconds of this I yell for Andy to open his tent and look at what we were seeing. “Do you know what that is?” I asked and about another 45 seconds go by responds “I have no idea I’ve never seen that before” so at this point we basically think we’re seeing aliens and with no real way to check what we were seeing we just left it as something we needed to look up later. I’ll fast forward to what it was for a second, we found out Space X had launched something like 27 satellites all at once and many people saw this strange formation so we were not alone, it was comforting to know we all didn’t have to become alien conspiracy believers after this.

Ben arrived at camp long after we had all gone to sleep so when we got up we all went on a little hike to try and find a spring before jumping in the trucks to head east where we would be finding camp for the next few nights. This was going to be a little bit of a different style of trip for us, normally we are on the move every day with a new camp every night but this weekend we decided we just wanted to relax and enjoy ourselves so we found a little cove away from any crowds and posted up for the next three days.

The last night we experienced very high winds, high enough that we put the fire out immediately as it didn’t feel like a great idea to let it keep going but the weather didn’t stop there this was to be the start of one of those great desert storms. Once it started raining we all retreated to my camper where we hung out and continued our conversations that were going on around the fire but as it got later every retreated back to their own trucks and we went to bed. I was awoken by heavy rain and it was a little alarming at first as this was my first night out in the new camper with real rain so I wasn’t sure how it would fair but was so relieved when we woke up and there wasn’t a drop of water to be found in the camper and it had held up so well against the strong wind all night as well. This was our last day so we slowly packed up reluctant to leave but for Andy, Anna, Olivia and I the day wasn’t over! Ben needed to be back so he hit the highway home and we continued exploring some areas not far from where we camped.

And that’s where our weekend ended, we went to gas/air up and said our goodbyes with a plan to come back and explore more of the areas we didn’t have time for, until next time!