Desert Peace

After spending our first two days at the mouth of a huge canyon, we moved to a campsite that is on a desert plain above the mouth of another canyon. In the photo, the white dot is our LabMobile. The road ends a little beyond where we camped so we saw almost no one.

I love the wide open nature of this site, especially when the sun is not super high in the sky yet. It prevents the canyon walls from bringing too many hours of shade to the site.

There is amazing mountain biking very close to this campsite but no one knows about it, as far as I can tell. I've never seen another mountain biker there in all the years that we've visited. Shyla and I can go for rides in complete solitude.

The trail snakes along the base of a series of towering rock walls. Eventually (in thousands of years), the trail will be gone because it's slowly eroding away, leaving ledges on its downhill side (the towering walls are to the left of Shyla in the photo below). The ledge in the next photo looks scary but it's only about 3' above the ground.

One day, after I dropped Shyla back at camp, I took a pretty long ride toward an old mining cabin that always fascinates me. It appears that the family who lived there just fled one day, leaving all of their belongings. It intrigues me to imagine living there back when transportation wasn't so easy.

You might remember the tricycle that I found there last year. As a lover of bikes, I spent a lot of time looking at it and photographing it. Imagining the child of the family riding this tricycle on the rocky paths made me smile.

When I found it last year, I thought about "hiding" it at the site so it wouldn't be too obvious for anyone to steal. I decided against it because I thought that others would enjoy seeing it too.

Sadly, someone did steal it sometime in the past year. I don't know why I repeatedly trust that people will be good and then allow myself to be disappointed. At least I have a whole series of fun photos of it. It was a Schwinn - and I wonder how the miners got it there!

After all of us got lots of exercise in the morning, we'd relax in the afternoon, watching the sunset and the stars start to twinkle. Of course, I couldn't resist taking star photos, despite the full moon. The moon was so bright that the cliffs near us looked almost as bright as during the day!

Ah, I miss the peacefulness of our time in the desert.