Sunday May 4, 22.8mi/36.7km

Halloran Summit (383.5/4100ft) to Shadow Mountains Wash (406.3/2860ft) (CA)

After checking the weather and seeing it was going to be nice and cool in the 60s for the next couple of days, I decided to continue on this trail. The morning was a nice cruise on dirt roads through a Joshua Tree forest.

After an hour I left the road network and traversed the rocky volcanic plateau towards Solomons knob.

Looking back at the plateau I had just crossed, unknowingly above a line of rimrock:

From there I cruised downhill on a pretty nice burro trail, which led me to wash and then this little guzzler.

There were plenty of these on the DWTH route, they’re built for wildlife to have drinking water. In this case, birds. I grabbed a liter from the guzzler, figuring the next source would be cattle-polluted. From there it was an easy bit of xc hiking through sparse Joshua trees up to another dirt road.

The guidebook called this “Fence pool”, it looked like it had been dry for many years.

The next water source listed in the guidebook was Francis Spring, which was indeed polluted by cattle. But it definitely had water.

As the morning went on, the sky became much cloudier and threatened to rain. But it was still a nice walk on very faint 2-track old roads thru Joshua trees.

The middle part of the day I had a couple miles of XC hiking through these annoying little bushes. They don’t have thorns or spines, but they are uncomfortable to walk through even in pants.

And I could see the Kingston Range to the north was getting a pretty good rainstorm. I had lunch underneath some huge power lines, which were very buzzy. Most of the afternoon was hiking along this abandoned old road which was actually really easy to follow.

It was a very enjoyable couple of hours, and then the road merged with a wash.

I followed the wash downhill until it was wide enough to have some flat camping spots, and I set up my tent before the approaching clouds arrived.

Good timing again, rain 20 minutes after I was in my tent!