Mostly Plants

3/18/2008
9:36 AM
Cottonwood Camp

Warm morning: everybody slept well. Ginger feels better. I’m wearing my kilt and t-shirt at 9:00 AM–a vast improvement over previous days! We cooked the rest of the bacon today, but fully half of it was consumed in a sudden grease fire. I washed the pair of pants that I had been wearing all week, and hung it on a Yucca to dry.

Pictures and more below the cut:

Our camp, with pants, and a closeup of the yucca where I hung my pants.

3:04 P
Lost Palm Canyon Some Little Arroyo

We have established our wilderness camp in [what we though, wrongly, might be] Lost Palm Canyon, a ways back from the trail. It is a beautiful desert filled with Juniper, Yucca, Creosote, and Wildflowers. We are all sunburned despite liberal application of sunblock. We are repacking and prepping for the 1-mile hike to Lost Palm Oasis, the largest fan-palm oasis in the park. There, we expect to find fam palms providing ample shade, sand beaches, and maybe a big-horned Sheep. We have seen many lizards today, but not one tortoise, sheep, or coyote. There are insects here, including a few large flies, but compared to an eastern forest, they are hardly annoying.

Camp Cayuga. Click for larger image.

You may notice in this image that I am doing something silly–setting up camp in a wash. This is almost always inadvisable due to the danger of flash floods, but I was comfortable doing it in this case because I was familiar with the weather forecast and knew that there was zero probability of precipitation anywhere nearby for the next two days.

Stay tuned for Day 5 Part 2: Our Journey to the Oasis (or: There and Back Again)