Today, we went for what we thought would be a fairly easy hike but turned out to be a bit tougher. The toughest thing was lack off proper sign-posts on the trail causing you to wonder if you're still on the correct path or if you've wandered off and sooner or later the natives are going to catch you and put you in their cook pot. Luckilly for us we were on the correct path today and made it out alive un-cooked.
We started off at the Thousand Palms Oasis Preserve.
http://coachellavalleypreserve.org/
We've hiked this before and there was a path we'd never been down: the Smoke Tree Trail. Not much to report. Just a dusty trail back toward the highway. Just a waste of time.
There was a nice hill to climb though - Squaw Hill - no idea why it's called that.
Doesn't look like much but it was a bit of a climb - especially after doing nothing for over a week while the punks were here.
Got a good shot of the palms below:
Got a nice shot looking back towards Palm Springs.
The clouds coming over the mountains like that is somewhat unusual. Don't think I've seen it before. We are expecting rain and wind here this weekend and I though that was the start of it but it wasn't. It cleared right up in about an hour.
So these are the Willis Palms - who knows why they're called that.
From a different angle
You can see the blackened trunks of the palms. This is a result of a fire a few years ago.
This website that has some cool pictures of the palms after the fire:
http://www.hiking-in-ps.com/images/willis/album/slides/
So we're going alog looking for the way back and we see this hill that looks totally out of place amongst all the sand and gravel and small rocks - it's a golden hill
It isn't really gold - just a very golden coloured clay. Who knows how it got there. We go around it and there's a couple more.
Very strange...it's like the earth just puked up all this golden clay.
Terri looking for the way back.
So we finally find what looks like the way out so we take it. By the time we got here I was thinking that we'd somehow lost the trail and that we were going to have to backtrack.
A shot of the lowlands from the top of the hill. This is what we walked through to find the way out.
Just a shot showing how desolate this country is. It's really something!
A couple vids: