Day 22

We got up at 6:00am after a short but enjoyable (and surprisingly warm) night's sleep and decided to take one more dip in the hot springs before we headed out for the day.

The "crab cooker" pool. This one was HOT.

View of the creek water and a slack line from one of the pools.

It was hard to leave but we have to keep moving so we finally packed up around 9:30am and set off again. The goal for the day was to reach Silverwood Lake but by 11am the heat was already becoming very intense. We followed the trail just above the river through the canyon for about 6 miles before finally reaching a spillway for the west fork of the Mohave river. This section was very hot, exposed, and steep. It was "waterless" even though it followed the river - the water was just so far down the slope that it was unreachable.

A neat rainbow-painted bridge over part of Deep Creek.

What the exposed canyon looked like.

I couldn't get this pic in focus, but see the fuzzy looking dried plant here? It's fuzzy looking because it's covered in teeny tiny little needle-like barbs that stick into you and hurt and you have to pick them out with tweezers. The canyon was covered in these. We took a break at one point and I tried to sit in a shady spot (the ONLY shady spot) and got about 50 little spikes in my hand. 

View down into the spillway at the end of our canyon walk. The amazing views really make all the hardships worth it.

Close up view of the spillway.

Walking from the spillway to our ford.

Fording the Mojave river. The first of many fords to come. 

Getting back to where it truly looks like desert again.

Shortly after the ford, we found our water source which ended up tasting terrible. It tasted like iron and eggs. Super gross. We were all feeling drained from the hot water of the hot springs yesterday and from the intense heat of the day today. We ended up taking a very long siesta here, napping and eating from about 1pm-4pm.

Chilling by the "blood-egg water" as we affectionately referred to it.

After our siesta we felt much refreshed, but the day had mostly slipped away and we were only at 6 miles. We mustered up some resolve and decided to night hike to our 20 mile goal.

Here I am in my desert garb that makes me look like I'm a ranger/prison inmate/ghostbuster, filtering our water with our Sawyer Squeeze. My desert pants are large size men's long underwear I found in a hiker box at Ziggy and the Bear's.

After a brief stop to filter some better tasting water we headed off into the sunset.

Night hiking was great. The temperature was awesome, no sun, no intense heat. We even saw some stuff we may have not seen during the day, like a tarantula!

He was about 4 inches long, pretty darn big if you ask me. I almost stepped on him, hauling butt down the trail in the dark. 

Also found this weird looking bug. This guy was about 2 inches long and freaky lookin.

We stopped at a dam with a creek crossing to make dinner. We could hear lots of toads in the dark. 

We made our 20 around 11pm and crashed hard in some bushes near the lake. We were really glad to have made our miles despite our setbacks today.