This report covers three quick day trips; two in the winter and one in the spring. We did the first two, to Alamo the Hard Way and to Bonelli Bay, with Sandy and Jodi on their annual visit to Las Vegas to escape the winter in the Minnesota arrowhead area for a while. The dogs and Beth accompanied us on the final trip.
We drove to Alamo the hard way. The route to get to Alamo did not follow US93, the paved route. Instead, we took the road through the Desert National Wildlife Refuge (DNWR), an unpaved road. We took a couple of side roads that we had not taken before as well. Since it was January we expected to get into the snow at higher elevations. We did.
The first place to stop at the DNWR is the (unmanned) visitors center at Corn Creek. You sign in there and can pick up the latest brochures on the area. The newest brochure is slicker and prettier than past ones but provides less information about what you can see along the side roads or about the trails at the end of some of these roads.
Our first side trip along the way was the White Rock road. It is about 30 miles from Corn Creek. We passed along in the basin between the Sheep Range to the east and the Pinkwater Range to the west. The basin is broad and the views expansive. The Pinkwater Range is not as high as the Sheeps; they look more barren, sometimes being nothing more than sandstone or limestone outcroppings rising out of the alluvial fans that used to be part of the mountains. The Sheeps are much higher, going to almost 10,000 feet. The tree line and snow made them more distinctive and scenic. The White Rock road rises up to snow level (about 4000 feet that day) but not to the tree line. We walked among the Joshua trees and brush, admiring the sandstone.
We drove from the White Rock road north to where the Cabin Springs Road turns off from the Alamo Road. We stopped past Sheep Pass on the edge of the hills in the East Desert Range. You could look across the basin to the Sheeps rising beyond. We were given a show by the Air Force as well. Several fighter planes screamed through the basin (at about the mountaintop level, some of them releasing targets for the other planes to seek and destroy. We ate lunch admiring the scenery and the planes. The solitude we felt after the planes left was even greater because of the absence of the earlier noise. We took the Cabin Springs road across the basin and then up into the Sheep Mountains. The snow started patchily again at 4000 feet. By the time we hit 4200 feet the snow was solid and getting deeper. We continued uphill until the 4wd would get us no further. We did not make it to the cabin or the springs. We will have to do that this summer. We got to the level of pinyon and juniper before getting stuck. While getting stuck sounds drastic, it was not. We had a force in our favor--gravity. A light push on the Durango moved us backwards to a place where I could turn the car around. From what we saw, the canyon we were heading into looked pretty interesting. Like I said before, it deserves furhter exploration. The canyon narrowed and rounded a curve. The foliage was also getting more interesting with the pinyon and juniper. But we turned around and headed for Alamo.
The spot that we would be more worried about getting stuck than in the snow loomed ahead. It was a sandy area in the playa. The road there weaved into several sandy paths, none of which looked inviting. But we, in reality, had little problem there.
Our next stop along the road was about 10 miles from the border of the refuge. We spotted what looked like a cave just above the road. We climbed up to it and found that it was not much of a cave burt more of a hole in the side of the mountain scoured out by wind and water erosion. The most interesting thing about the cave was on the floor if it. It was covered with dung pellets from mountain sheep. We guessed that they huddled in there in the winter to avoid the wind and gain some protection from the rain.
We finally came out at the back of the Pahranagat National Wildlife Refuge just south of Alamo (We never really got to Alamo, but that doesn't matter. It was the trip and what we saw along the way that was important). The Refuge consists of two desert lakes fed by springs. A sometimes grassy, sometimes marshy area exists between the lakes. Alamo means cottonwood, and there were plenty of them along the lakes. We did not really stop to admire the lakes, but we drove by slowly to admire them. It was getting late and we had dinner reservations.
We went to Bonelli bay in February. It was warm for the season, and we even found a few early wildflowers. Bonelli Bay is near Temple Bar on Lake Mead. We had gone to the Wilson Buttes area with Sandy and Jodi the year before. The Bonelli Bay area, as you would guess by the name, fronts Lake mead.
We stopped at the west side of the area first. We noticed a white bar of land, possibly gypsum based, possibly limestone, and decided to hike cross country to it. but we were deceived by desert distances. It appeared to be a mile away, but after we had gone a mile, it still appeared to be a mile away. It was probably 5 miles to it. So we turned back and explored the bay and the willows growing at the shore. From there we drove to the east side of the bay. This location is more scenic. We hiked up a narrow, steeply sided wash for about a mile, seeing how the running water had carved the steep walls out of sand and sandstone. A later trip would reveal a horde of wildflowers growing in the wash, including desert 5 spot, rock nettles and sun ray, all of which have spectacular flowers. After about a mile the wash widened significantly and we climbed to the road to return to our starting point. From there we headed northwest to an inlet in the bay that was surrounded by sandstone. The inlet shone turquoise in the otherwise blue lake. There were a million use or animal trails in the area, all generally leading to the bay. The water stopped abruptly in a channel that was narrow enough to make it look like it had been dug my people. But it was probably there, carved by runoff, long before the lake was created. You could, in warmer weather, dive from the rocks into the lake there. We did see some large fish, probably small mouth bass, there. On our way back to the car we came upon a thick area of gypsum that had been eroded by runoff. The area was flat, sloping gently to the lake. The gypsum deposit was less than a foot thick. The gypsum had recrystallized when the rainwater that did not run off had dried. The area looked like a miniature Bryce Canyon, with spires and hoodoos only an inch or two tall. Or an exercise in fractals drawn on a monochrome monitor. It was very interesting I had wanted to return to the spot later in the spring to see if bear claw poppies grew there. They are an endangered species that requires gypsum soil.
As a final part of this trip we took the 4wd loop road into the area of Cohenour Mine, an old, abandoned mine. The road wound through narrow canyons and around a limestone mountain. We saw tons of signs of wild horses and burros, but spotted only one small group that consisted of a burro and about 4 or 5 horses. The road was interesting, particularly on the north side of the loop. The canyons were steeper there.
The final trip in this set took us to Keyhole Canyon. Keyhole Canyon is unique in the area in that it is a canyon carved in granite instead of limestone or sandstone. Because of the rock's= hardness, the canyon is small, probably no more than 300 meters in length. It is also steep, with a number of dry waterfalls. We took the dogs on this trip and they enjoyed being outdoors. They learned their lesson from an earlier trip. The first thing Hog did on that trip was to go sniff a jumping cholla plant. We picked needles out of his nose for hours. Harley brushed against a cholla and it stuck on him. So he bit it. His face was a mass of needles too. The dogs enjoyed climbing on the rocks with us.
It was March and I spent a lot of time climbing around the rocks getting at the different wildflowers growing in different environments: sandy wash bottoms, sheltered cliff bases, hillsides, etc. The canyon is enjoyable and provides some shade for the hot days of summer. Indeed, the hillsides beside road into the canyon were yellow with suncups and other early poppies. Fiddleneck, with its little spikes of yellow flowers and white desert pincushions also colored the hills. They are more like bellyflowers, so they were not as apparent from the car. The late rains in February and March salvaged the wildflower year after several bad years.
Return to Short Trips Page