Monday May 5, 24.4mi/39.3km

Shadow Mountains Wash (406.3/2860ft) to Above Amargosa River (430.7/880ft) (CA)

It had sprinkled on and off overnight, so I packed up a damp tent, and left a dry rectangle on the ground. Ha!

The hike down the rest of the wide wash was easy and I slowly woke up as my feet crunched over the gravel.

After a couple of miles, the wash was channeled into a deep slot canyon. Not going in there!

I detoured right. followed some gravelly terrain to a different wash, which led me to Kingston Spring.

I poked around the spring, which took a while given how thick some of the brush was, and determined there was no water there. The guidebook says occasionally BLM the will come and burn away the brush, since all that vegetation consumes all the water, leaving none for the animals. Or in my case, people! I didn’t need the water but I added the information to the water report for the Desert Trail. From there I continued an hour on a nice 4wd road, which was easy to follow and even had some of these fancy markers at two of the turns.

When I got to Kingston Road, a medium-clearance dirt road, I took a long break and celebrated finishing the end of that section by finishing my jar of Nutella. The next segment of hiking was 27 miles long and would take me across the Valjean Valley and Amargosa River Canyon. I started with some easy XC across the Valjean Valley.

The clouds kept things nice and cool, I would not want to be crossing this valley when it was sunny and 90°F. As I approached some little hills, they turned out to be sand dunes and I noticed all the ground around me was becoming buried in soft sand.

At the top of a little pass I had a pretty great view to the north. The sandy area is called the Dumont dunes.

I followed an easy wash down from the little pass and encountered even bigger sand dunes.

Thankfully it wasn’t windy at all today or I might have been getting sandblasted. From there it was a slow hike XC across some flat sandy terrain.

There was hardly any vegetation to weave around, it was mostly just the energy sucking sand to slow me down. It’s probably the same stuff they use in the runaway truck ramps! After over an hour that I came to an old railroad grade, what used to be the Tonopah-Tidewater railroad.

Which weirdly had a DirecTV satellite dish installed nearby. The wires didn’t connect to anything so as far as I could tell it was not functional.

I have no idea why that was there, my guess is it’s part of some geocache game. The rest of the day I spent hiking on the flat railroad grade, underneath an ever-changing sky of clouds.

The way they built this railroad grade baffled me, it just went straight across all the little washes, no bridges or anything. Like where was the water supposed to go? No wonder it has a bunch of washed-out areas.

Finally, at the end of the day I entered the Amargosa Canyon, which seemed to protect me from most of the wind out in the open dune areas. I set up my tent in the least rocky spot I could find and enjoyed the sunset.

Tomorrow, it’s only 12 miles to Tecopa!