Tuesday April 29, 18.6mi/29.9km

Bull Canyon (284.4/3810ft) to Kelso Depot boundary (303.0/2060ft) (CA)

Since I was up pretty late last night, I slept in and didn’t get moving until 8am. I had three more miles in the wash, and while it was much less brushy than the wash yesterday, it was still rocky.

Bull Canyon is known to be wild and remote, and apparently there’s even some water pools!

Though I learned later that it had just rained 6 days ago, so the water is probably just temporary.

After a couple of miles, I came to these neat little pools above a dryfall.

While scenic, they necessitated a detour around, which meant going up the canyon walls and back down. I hiked up the opposite wall to scout out my intended route up the rocks.

It looked reasonable, so I crossed the wash and scrambled up the rocks.

Twenty minutes later, I was descending back down until the canyon. I heard these loud flock of birds, just hanging out on top of a large boulder.

Once I was back in the bottom of the wash, I got a good look at the obstacle I had detoured around.

The guidebook suggests you might be able to climb down that dryfall. Umm….no. I continued on down the easy wash on flat slabs of rock.

There were several more little pools of water, which is always surprising to see out here.

And the cool white stripes in the canyon cliffs!

My last little obstacle of the morning was these little slickrock pools. They were shallow so I could have easily walked right through them, but I figured out a way to keep my feet dry by using some stemming moves from rock climbing.

Soon after that, I left the canyon and walked along a sandy dirt road for a couple miles.

In the distance, I could see my objective for the afternoon, the world famous Kelso Dunes.

I got to the Kelso Dunes campground at lunchtime, and I unburied my water and food that I had cached a few weeks ago. It looked like some curious human had started to dig a little bit where I had buried it, and then an opportunistic critter chewed a little bit on the odor-proof bag. But everything was fine so the system still worked!

I met Rob & Kathy who were camping there, and we had a fun conversation about this trail I’m hiking and the desert and general. It had been awhile since I had a conversation with other people, there’s no one else out here hiking! After lunch I left the campground and headed into the dunes.

The wind made these cool ridge patterns in the sand.

And also these cool edge patterns.

It was pretty windy at the top of the dunes, and I could see in real time the process of dune formation.

That photo is looking at the leeward side of the dune, where the sand is deposited by the wind. After enough sand is piled up, the hillside becomes too steep and the sand slides down. It felt like I was getting sandblasted up there, so I quickly continued down the other side of the dunes.

My objective for the end of the day was near Kelso Depot, just before the darker ridge in the distance.

I hiked in a perfectly straight line across a sandy valley all afternoon. Camping at Kelso Depot isn’t allowed, so I hiked as far as I could, while staying in public land. The miles this morning were pretty slow, so I ended up hiking until 7pm before stopping to camp.

I was too lazy to setup my tent, so I watched the sunset from my bivy bag.