Friday May 2, 22.8mi/36.7km

Kelso Wash (343.2/4370ft) to Black Tank Wash (365.0/3820ft) (CA) +1.0mi non-sucky alt

I started off the day hiking through the same Joshua Tree forest from yesterday.

After an hour of that bliss, I came out of the forest and saw the hamlet of Cima. It’s basically just some railroad tracks and a couple of train buildings.

For the next hour, I covered some miles on a paved road. I saw exactly 0 cars, a pretty quiet road!

And then it was back into the Joshua Tree forest, on the climb up Cima Dome. Except that had all been burned in a giant wildfire.

From the looks of things, the fire was not recent but I need to look up the year. The guidebook told me to “follow an old dirt road along a fence line”, but the fence was surely in ashes, and bushes had overtaken the old road. So for an hour I played the game of “find faint traces of an old road”, which I was mostly successful at but it required a lot of concentration. Next I came to an old corral with a water tank. At least, it had been a water tank about 20 years ago.

In this area the old dirt road had been recently improved, which was a little suspicious. And a few minutes later I came across a half-dozen No Trespassing signs, so I backtracked to the corral area. I also found some new construction on a solar well.

And a working windmill which was pumping, but the pipe didn’t lead anywhere.

I had phone signal so I downloaded some more maps and discovered that this area is a private inholding, that pre-dates the formation of the Mojave Reserve. So my guidebook isn’t outdated, it was always wrong! Neat. I hiked up the rest of Cima Dome, through a charred and mostly non-existent Joshua Tree forest.

Pretty cactus flowers.

With all the vegetation gone, the views on top of Cima Dome were spectacular. I could see the Granite Mountains and the Kelso Dunes, where I had been 4 days ago.

On the hike down the other side, I came across this strange benchmark for Teutonia, which is a little peak about three miles north of here.

As I followed the ancient remains of an old 2-track dirt road, I kept noticing these boulders with barbed wire tied around them. Maybe this used to be the fence?

As morning turned into early afternoon, I noticed it started to become really cloudy. Time to get lower!

I never would have noticed the junction of two different barely discernable 2-track roads, had it not been for this little cairn.

I made the turn on to the new “road” which led to Deer Spring.

I filtered a few liters, I had almost 30 miles to get to interstate 15 and my next water cache.

It’s crazy to me that in almost 400 miles of hiking on this trail, this is my first natural water source. Everything up to now has been spigots at campgrounds, or the water caches I placed beforehand. Dry trail! From this point, the guidebook says to hike 5 miles xc, weaving through bushes and cacti. That sounded miserable, so instead I mapped out an alternate route that used nearby dirt roads, and is 6 miles long. It led by some more defunct corrals.

It was a relaxing hike without having to dodge prickly plants or constantly navigate towards a bearing. at the end of the day I left the road and entered Black Tank Wash.

It was beautiful and these interesting new volcanic rocks were starting to appear, but the granite gravel was very soft and made forward progress very tiring. As usual, I camped in a wash.

Hopefully it doesn’t get windy tonight it’s pretty wide open here.