Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

5 Days in the Desert travelog #17
Afton Canyon, CA - Mon, 26 Dec 2022, 11am

Today we decided to do another combination 4x4/hiking trek in the Mojave Desert. We drove east of Barstow to Afton Canyon and down to the Mojave River, where the Mojave Road follows the course of the river through the canyon.



There's an element of revenge travel to this particular trek. We visited here years ago, back in '03 or '04, also in the month of December. It was bitter cold when we camped at night. One, I'm glad we're "motel camping" this trip. Two, on that trip I looked at crossing the Mojave River in my Jeep Cherokee 4x4 and I chickened out. Oh, we still explored up the canyon a bit, but we were limited to how far we could walk. I've been wanting to go back... go back and cross the river.

I checked online for trail conditions. Searchable information online is kind of sparse compared to what I recall finding years ago. I think a lot of it has disappeared behind membership logins. Of course, it's hard to figure out which forums are worth joining when you can't see the quality of the discussions beforehand. Anyway, what little I did find indicated the river crossing should be managable unless it's rained recently... which it hasn't.

In addition I checked with a knowledgeable local we met in the campground near the river. He said the crossing was good and offered to help us pull back out if we got stuck. Here's a video from our crossing:


To be continued....

5 Days in the Desert travelog #19
Afton Canyon, CA - Mon, 26 Dec 2022, 1pm

Not long after leaving an impressive but unnamed side canyon off the Mojave River, we arrived at Spooky Canyon.



We knew where it was because the friendly guy back at Afton Camp had a guidebook that identified the distance from camp (3.8 miles), the number of the railroad bridge (194.65), and even had a picture so we knew to look for a low, short trestle like you can see above. In fact as we were driving up the canyon we crossed paths with 4x4er coming down from the east. He had the same guidebook and recommended we visit. He had questions for us, too, BTW. He was happy to hear that the water crossings further west were passable.



We headed up into the narrows of Spooky Canyon. After the serendipity of the previous, unnamed side canyon we explored, Spooky Canyon felt... not very special. And totally not spooky. "What's so spooky about this?" became and in-joke Hawk and I tossed back and forth.



Okay, so apparently what's so spooky about Spooky Canyon is that... wait for this... it gets dark at the back. There's a cave. You need flashlights.

Whatever.

I mean, it's still beautiful. It's just that we felt a greater sense of awe, not to mention delved about 10x deeper, in that unnamed side canyon we found for ourselves.