A short, off-trail mountain scramble and climb near the Wind Caves area of the park. We didn’t go all the way in because my Accord was probably not meant to be on the sandy dirt road leading to the caves.

After getting back to the car from the Hellhole Canyon trail, we decided to stop off in the town of Borrego Springs for a quick lunch / brunch / cold water enjoyment moment.

The town itself is very odd. It’s basically a small rotary with streets running in the cardinal directions. There are a few small businesses on each stretch, with a park in the middle of the circle. It was a curious collection of high-end tourist businesses and extreme opposite end of the spectrum hardware and grocery stores for the locals.

It also seemed like the vast majority of the population was late middle-aged or retired, which is really odd considering the town is literally in the middle of a wilderness state park. The town of Joshua Tree, which stradles one of the entrances to the National Park, is always bustling with young outdoorspeople, drinking organic coffee and fruit smoothies before heading out for the next trail run. Here, the major to-do seemed to be the Foreign Legion building.

We stopped for lunch at the Badlands Cafe, centrally located in “The Mall,” one of the town’s four commercial strips. They were getting ready to close for the summer, but what little food they had left was still pretty amazing. Although, after hiking in the full sun for a few hours, anything with ice water tastes like a banquet.

After relaxing in the air-conditioning for a bit, we packed back up and headed to the central section of the park for the Wind Caves. On the way there, the paved road gave way to an ill-defined dirt road / dry wash lined with small boulders.

I’ve got nothing against the dirt roads, personally. I just know my 1997 Accord isn’t necessarily supposed to be driving on them. But the tire treads left by actual four-wheel-drives looked solid enough to move on, so I pressed inward, white-knuckled. Trying to carefully avoid the deep sand and protruding rocks, I managed to coax the car down the road – stopping only once to hit a rock. No damage, thankfully. We got the car as far as we could before the road turned into more dune than drive, at a place I think makes a pretty damn fine advertising poster for the Accord:

As we got out and looked around, we couldn’t see the trailhead anywhere. Turns out the road continued on for another three miles before it got anywhere near the trail. The day was getting pretty close to sundown, and a three mile hike on a road didn’t sound too enticing. So we improvised.

My trail companions were fairly experienced boulder scramblers. At this time, I’d only gone off-trail once before, and that was still on a semi-defined trail. Used to hiking on my own, I’d trained myself to be overly cautious – constantly checking maps at trail forks, always packing more supplies than I needed, and taking time to plan and test crossings when I got to dangerous parts of the trail.

I was a bit hesitant, I will admit – but my companions were eager and patient with my lack of skill and/or experience … and I wasn’t about to let a day go by with just one serious hike in it. So we aimed ourselves at a pile of fallen rocks and started just climbing straight into the mountains. I figured it’d be pretty similar to leaping stones to cross a stream, except less slippery. And, you know, if I fell, I wouldn’t get wet. I’d just tumble down a cliff or something.

We scrambled / climbed up the ridge to the wind-blasted caves at the top, plunging hands into the brittle ground in search of anchored sandstone and lightly stepping over the loose fallen boulders. Again, we didn’t see any bighorn sheep up there, but we did spot tracks and droppings. So I can say we saw SIGNS of bighorn sheep. Which sounds more scientific and mysterious anyway.

We hung out on the ridge for a little while before crawling / sliding down into another canyon that looked like it would take us back out to the dirt road. We climbed down for a little while before we reached the road. Unfortunately, there was about a 30 foot drop between it and us.

I assumed we would just hike back to where we climbed down to climb back up and backtrack. That’s because I was still in the trail-hiking mindset. Instead, we found this incline and pulled ourselves up and out of the canyon.

My legs were stiff, my arms sore, and my palms torn by sandstone. And it was fantastic. I think I like this “scrambling” thing.

On the way back through town, we picked up some Red Nectar to celebrate the first full day and headed out to try to find a campsite. Previously, the rangers had told us the developed campgrounds were full, but we would probably be able to snag a choice undeveloped site, so we drove to the northeastern part of the park for the Arroyo Salado campground.

The rangers had warned us of some high desert winds for the night, but recommended Arroyo Salado as having a decent amount of cover. What they should have mentioned was that there was really only ONE site that had decent cover, and the rest would be fairly open to the 30 mile-an-hour gusts blowing down from the mountains. Luckilly, we were only people at the campground, so we didn’t really have to worry about fighting for prime wind-shields.

We settled in behind the largest ridge and quickly set up camp, rushing to beat the sunset. We got everything in order enough to grab a few beers and climb to the top of our ridge to watch the sunset. Undeterred by the blasts of wind or the sand blowing into our beer, we sat and quietly watched the sun sink behind the park’s western mountain range.

We climbed down to camp and – after some wind-based difficulties – got our campfire going. Renee brought out the iPod speakers and put on some old Calexico. The perfect desert soundtrack to good conversation, a warm fire, and the constellations appearing one by one.

Originally hiked on May 27, 2006.
– Additional information available at the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park web site .
– Pictures on Flickr .
– Map It