Deserts: day 4
This post is part 4 of the "deserts_2009" series:
The sky must have cleared really fast, because we actually saw the sunrise at 6AM, and the sky was cloud free at that point. While it was great that the weather was nice in the morning, the tent apparently leaked all over its floor during the night. Every spot where something sat on the tent floor had a puddle inside the tent, including our sleeping pads. Also, the rain fly was still soaked. I made another stupid mistake during the night, and left our shoes sitting outside the tent, in the rain. So we had soaked shoes, soaked assorted gear inside the tent, and a wet tent to pack up. I carried David to the car so that he didn't end up with cold wet feet, and then proceeded to pack up the mess as best as I could. I actually did bring three super absorbent towels just in case there was a leak somewhere, but there was just too much wet everywhere for them to get it all. I packed it all up, and we headed southward on S2, out of the park.
The plan for the last day of the trip was to spend it exploring the little known Yuha Desert region. The Yuha Desert is best summarized here on WikiPedia. I didn't even know about the Yuha until somewhat recently when I accidentally stumbled across a few blog posts by someone who spent some time there as part of the SCA a few years ago, and was intrigued. Additionally, I came across some posts & pictures on a few offroad exploration forums that I read. Going in, I largely suspected that finding anything would be a bit challenging, as there are no official maps of the BLM controlled region available online (at least that I could locate), and the unofficial maps that I did find tended to conflict with one-another on route markings, and even the location of geographic points of interest.
The first goal of the day was to locate the sandy road that led to the US/Mexican border, and hike it. I'm a bit fascinated by the physical location of lines on a map, and the US/Mexican border was one that was relatively readily accessible in the area. All of the online information that I found (including the official USGS topo map of the region) showed that there was definitely an unnamed road that ran perpendicular right up to the border. From what Google told me, I needed to take "Coyote Road #2" 1.6 miles west of CA-98, at which point, I'd hit the intersection of the unnamed road, and then take that almost exactly 2 miles south to the border. "Coyote Road #1" was well marked, so I continued on expecting to see a clearly marked "Coyote Road #2" and didn't see it when it should have been. Instead I saw a completely unmarked road with a huge sign for the Crucifixion Thorn Bushes.
While I was planning to check them out later on, I didn't expect them to be on "Coyote 2" (later on I discovered one obscure reference on one website stating that they were, in fact, at the eastern terminus of "Coyote 2"). Since we were there anyway, I pulled the car to the side of this gravel/sand road, and we got out to look around. The fine folks at the BLM put up a lovely, informative sign claiming that claimed that these thorn bushes were right in front of us, yet all I saw were a bunch of sickly looking creosote bushes. While I wasn't 100% sure what the thorn bushes looked like, I knew that what we did see were not thorn bushes and was really annoyed & puzzled why the BLM would put up a sign claiming that they were right there, when they were most definitely not. At that point, I was guessing that they had either all died, or the BLM is just a bunch of lazy fools who didn't want to haul the sign to the real location. So David & I got back in the car, and decided to explore this mystery road further, since it ran west right up into the not too distant mountains. Low & behold, less than 500ft down the road we found the Crucifixion thorn bushes in all their glory. They're fairly large bushes, yet from the distance they kinda looked like crazy overgrown creosote. David & I inspected them for a little while, and then got back into the car to check out this mystery road.
After driving roughly another 2 miles, and passing some useless BLM road number markers, practically at the mountains, we came upon a sign labeled "Coyote 2 Dump Station - 1000ft ahead". So all this time, we were on the exact road that I was looking for, and didn't even know it. Even more interestingly, this road was super wide, as if it was built for some special purpose. It could easily fit 4 or 5 cars across, and there were several stretches that were paved at one point in the past, but were now severely degraded to the point where having them unpaved would have been preferable. The portions that were unpaved were very well graded. Now that I knew that I was on the right road, I needed to find the correct turn off, since we passed at least 3 at this point. I decided to backtrack all the way to the start off the road at CA-98, and then measure out the 1.6 miles, and hope that there was a real road there. Low and behold, 1.6 miles took us to a real road, labeled "BLM 285" and "EXIT 7".
<side rant>
GOOGLE: please add the BLM road numbers to your maps so that they're useful. BLM: please buy a clue and put your road maps online so that they're useful. Now as for what "EXIT 7" means, I have no clue. We never passed exits 1 through 6, and as much as "Coyote 2" was a nice wide graded road, it was by no means a freeway or highway, so giving it exits seemed ridiculous. The only online reference that I could find to any of this silliness was here but it just talks about DHS surveillance equipment being used in the area to catch drug & alien smuggling activity.
</side>
Now that we had found the road we needed, I was reasonably confident that it was a 2 mile walk south to the border fence. While I was somewhat tempted to drive it, I didn't have any good information on the quality of this road. The beginning was only 1 car width wide, with a rather high shoulder, so if the road suddenly degraded, I would have been stuck trying to drive it in reverse all the way back to Coyote 2. That felt like a bad idea, and a great way to ruin my day, so I opted to walk the 2 miles over what was clearly flat terrain. David & I set off, and spotted the fence after walking roughly a mile. We both started to get excited, as we knew that were almost there. The road itself turned out to be in good condition the entire length, with only some washboarding here & there, but nothing that our car couldn't have handled. Regardless, the walk itself was pleasant. We did see signs of human activity along the way, including random articles of clothing & some car parts (sideview mirror, a smashed windshield & a bumper - my best guess is that someone was doing something either very stupid or very illegal and tried to take their vehicle off the road, and wrecked it in the process). I knew from reading online that the area was crawling with live US Border Patrol agents as well as electronic surveillance equipment, but we saw neither during the walk to the border.
Once we got there, we saw that the fence is actually comprised of old railroad tracks, welded together in 15ft segments. Amusingly, each segment was separated by at least a 3ft gap that anyone could easily walk through. I can only guess that the fence's purpose it to block vehicles from crossing the border, since its just about useless in preventing humans from doing so. While there we spotted a few other oddities. There was yet another "EXIT 7" sign at the terminus of BLM 285. There was also this stone/concrete wall about 8ft long, sitting perpendicular to the border, about 20ft north of the wall. I have no clue why it was there, as it seemed to serve no other purpose than as a resting bench. About 20ft north of that wall, was some kind of stone monument with a carved plaque at the top. Unfortunately, that plaque was so badly weathered that I couldn't make out what it used to say (I'd love to find out some time though). One final piece of amusement was this sign, knocked down on the ground, which said in Spanish, "Caution! - Don't expose yourself to the elements - It's not worth it!". The sign also included amusing & baffling images of the sun, mountains, an angry rattlesnake, cacti in a desert lanscape, and oddly, someone swimming. They all made sense with the exception of the swimmer. We're in the middle of the Yuha Desert. The nearest sizable body of water is the Salton Sea, which is at least 40 miles northeast. I just don't get the swimmer at all. From some brief research these signs are posted all along the US side of the border warning illegals to turn back. Why DHS thinks that someone who has just traveled dozens, if not hundreds of miles to break into the US, across some of the most miserable desert in the world, is going to turn back just because a sign is warning them about the perils of the desert (which they've already crossed on the Mexican side) is beyond me. I guess I'll chalk this up to government stupidity.
After stopping on 'the bench' to eat a brief snack, David & I headed back the way we came. At this point, we had to have been walking around the area for close to two hours, when suddenly behind me I heard a noise. I looked back and saw a helicopter flying in fast from the east, directly above the border fence. As soon as it was over the BLM 285 intersection, it cut north and started to fly directly towards us. I quickly made out the US Border Patrol logo on the helicopter and assumed that they were coming to check us out. They flew right above us, and hovered for a few seconds. David smiled & waived at them, and then they flew off to the northwest. I'm still unsure whether I should be impressed or disappointed in that display of government power & waste. While I could have understood perhaps sending a patrol vehicle out (we saw tons of them over the next 24 hours), but the cost of flying a helicopter out to where there are well defined roads seems frivolous & wasteful, especially to check out two people.
For the curious, here's Google's and Yahoo's mapping of where we were at the border.
Following the excursion to the border, we went up to the Anza Campground on BLM 274. Its not so much a campground as just an area of land designated for primitive camping. In fact, there's not even a sign up there to indicate exactly where the camping land is, so if I didn't happen to have some printouts without me that labeled the rough borders of the camping area, I wouldn't have even known where to setup.
The remainder of the pictures are posted here.
This post is part 4 of the "deserts_2009" series: