Moments in Dirt and Ink

Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park interactive map link I guess I am in search of waterfalls, because I decided to go off and see the Great ones. One may go to see them from the Virginia side by visiting Great Falls Park or the Maryland side by visiting Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park. Both are National Park Service units and with the government shutdown, all pay areas were closed. This meant the whole of Great Falls Park was closed, but only the Great Falls Tavern Visitor Center was closed on the canal side. When they are open, these pay areas have a $20 entrance fee. The parking area I chose beside Macarthur Boulevard is both official and free. I chose to visit the Maryland side because the trail system has more obvious looping excursions, but it looks like there's plenty of good hiking on the Virginia side too. I hoped that with so many people inside the Beltway shirking their work, traveling the Beltway to just outside the Beltway would...

Shasta-Trinity National Forest DAY 1  |  DAY 2  |  DAY 3 Brown lines for day 3. Click for interactive map Seeing the Grand National Mine had been a thought for the previous day, but since we hadn't got to it, we decided to stop by on the way out. There was plenty of time. It did mean we wouldn't get to see what the lower trail was like, but sometimes you just have to make sacrifices. First, I took a little longer exploring the lake, this time looking for "better" water. Mist plays across the water once more. Watching the mists cross the lake. Watching the mists from another angle. There's a few well used camps along the west side of the lake with a couple well trod trails getting among them. Some were more elaborately situated than others.

Klamath National Forest DAY 1  |  DAY 2  |  DAY 3  |  DAY 4 Green lines for day 3. Click for interactive map Well, I hadn't been too crazy about trying to go up Preston via the route that some claim has several solid class 3 climbs while others seem to think is just a "high class 2" all the way when I had rested muscles. I wasn't any more interested when my legs still felt done over from fighting an overgrown trail for much longer than it should have required. We settled on trying for Copper Mountain with a plan to walk the ridge from Cyclone Gap. We packed up and headed down with a rather more than brief stop to saw off all the limbs of a tree that had fallen along the trail. Daniil carried in the saw and cut the limbs and all who hike the trail this season should be thanking him, because it wasn't very passable before the saw came out. A look back to the cirque of Raspberry Lake with Preston Peak rising up behind the false peak that dominat...

Stillwater Field Office BLM ( map link ) The bit of geocaching at the mining areas on the way up to Mable Mountain seemed quite successful, so I set out to find a couple more before stopping by the library in Hawthorne and then finding a new camp with easy access to Corey Peak. They were actually on the menu for the day I drove in, but the faint roads that lead to them proved so hard to see that I went right past before knowing it. With a lot more care, I got stopped in the right places on the way out. Since absolutely no one would care if I parked at the side of the road, I decided against challenging off road parking spots and didn't repeat throwing the car into a sand trap. First up, Lazy Man . I approached it from a hill that had been cut, but not for a road. Buildings and other structures and tailings from the Lazy Man Mine, worked around the 1930s?, lie below. The mine spreads out all around the hill. I headed down the hill, trackless on the south side, to hav...

Stillwater Field Office BLM ( map link ) I headed down the good road from camp to another decaying road to hike the high point of the Garfield Hills. I thought I might go up that road far enough to clear the bit of private property around Garfield Flat, but decided against due to the rocks down the middle and just pulled over to park instead. Was that sand? I got out to verify that yep, I'd done an excellent job of parking, completely clearing the road, and sticking myself into somewhat deep sand. Since getting out of the sand would just mean having to find a new place to park, I decided to leave that task for later. No need for extra steps. I did a pretty good job of not fretting about it during the day as I took off up the road. This day would be road travel past the Bataan Mine , then a bit of the ridge between Mable Mountain and the high point to the day's goal. Then I'd take a slightly shorter route back with more cross country and less mine and road. Some ori...

Stillwater Field Office BLM ( map link ) If I could figure out a way to make permanent travel work, I'd have turned south to finish wiggling around Nevada. I've not, so I turned north to finish circling Nevada. However, there were still a few days of good weather left, so I stalled out in the Garfield Hills to check them out. Reports for getting to the high point on Peakbagger indicate Garfield Flat Road is rather rough on the east side, where it starts in Mina almost at an NDOT station. I came by the west side, past a tiny NDOT sign stating this road gets "minimal maintenance", and up some wash crossings. It looked like that minimal maintenance was quite recently done. I decided I would go up Mable Mountain. I read it as "Marble" and was a little upset there's no obvious marble like spots on it. There is a marble quarry half a mile down the road from my camp, though. There's no hint of marble on this Mable Mountain. I considered combini...

Tonopah Field Office BLM ( map link ) I had looked out at the colorful mountains and thought "I want to go there" and then gone off to some mountains that turned out to be a bit south of the ones I was looking at. The Silver Peak Range does have plenty of its own color, it is true, but I still wanted some wandering in the Monte Cristo Range. A little bit, anyway. As I poked at my resources, little Castle Peak and an Earthcache became my main targets. I ended up needing a second geocache to find the road I was aiming at for access. According to the page for it, it's the best road to Gilbert. Graders working the sides of the highway had very much ignored it while they scraped 60 feet clear and contoured it toward a nearby culvert. Once properly on the road, only a few places wanted to rub my car's tummy or were uncomfortably soft. It probably would have been fine on a rough wash entry, but I hit the brakes and backed up instead. I'd just seen a nice flat ca...

Tonopah Field Office BLM ( map link ) My initial plans for a western approach to the high point of Rhyolite Ridge may have been foiled (perhaps by my own timidity), but I could still find a way up on the east side to bag this 1000 foot prominence peak. The west side sure looks a lot easier. There is a track on Peakbagger indicating it didn't require any class 5.3 moves or anything, so I set out to make the attempt in spite of all the clearly visible cliffs. Rhyolite Ridge from the east side. Boundary Peak (and higher Montgomery next to it) through the gap. Taller, but not very prominent. The route up is far to the north on little used roads and my little car still has only two drive wheels and 6 inches of clearance, so there would be a bit of walking before the real climbing began. From camp, the roads going my way are inconveniently placed, so I just set out across the scrub. Not a hard hike with a patch of cholla along the way. I got to a rough road and followed it ...

Tonopah Field Office BLM ( map link ) Stopping in the Tonopah Field Office, I found it a lot less tourist directed than Bristlecone (Ely) or Caliente had been. The woman directing the office traffic said she wishes Battle Mountain (their district) had a nice recreation guide like that one from Ely. There isn't. You can find a brochure about a few people buried in the cemetery next to the Clown Hotel, though. She did find someone who could tell me a little about the roads. As long as there hadn't been any big rains recently (no... I think?) the road over Emigrant Pass might be good enough. The road past Coyote Springs would be excellent. There are no developed trails in the area. I started with iffy hoping for a big circle. Emigrant Pass is just one of the many so named because it happened to have an emigrant trail over it. This one happens to be in the Silver Peak Range. If I don't mind the several areas of gravel rubbing the underside of my car, it's good east of...

Great Basin National Park (blue-green line, map link ) DAY 1  |  DAY 2 I got out of the tent with the reds of dawn just touching the top of the surrounding cliffs of Baker Lake. My puffy pants and jacket were quite welcome, but the second jacket was removed within 5 minutes for being too hot. It would have been a very welcome addition at the 7,700 foot camp, but not so much at the 10,600 foot camp. The sun lightly touches the rocks above Baker Lake. Sunrise at Baker Lake. Breakfast was made, but it takes quite a while to eat it when pondering the way the light and water and rocks play together. I wandered about the lake with breakfast in hand, finding that there's a large camping area among the trees a bit west of where I was. The bit of lake beside it, separated by the low water level, was half frozen.

Great Basin National Park (redder lines, map link ) DAY 1  |  DAY 2   I certainly needed a rest day after my short, but hard, trip up Eagle Peak. Since none of my backpacking food was sorted out, it was good to have that time to pre-make some breakfast mixes of couscous and spice and fruit and cheese for breakfast and discover that only one of my dried beans packets was in the car. Turns out not seeing it in the room doesn't mean it's in the car already. I decided to experiment with wasabi peas as a dehydrated legume. Then I had the time to weigh it all and decide that if it's 20 pounds, camera and all, I could certainly toss in a second coat. (Eagle Peak Campsites must be a cold spot because it didn't turn out to be any colder at Baker Lake, but one does expect a higher place to be colder generally.) I even had some time to write even if it wouldn't get posted until I stopped by the county library in Ely. Then I headed back up the rough and narrow, but st...