Serpentine....

We got a gentle rain most of Sunday night and early Monday morning, which is what we heard on our roof as we roused ourselves from our slumber for another day in the desert.  We find ourselves on the edges of an ancient dry lake bed here just about 8 miles from Borrego Springs, and the picture below taken by our good friend Steven Dempsey  via his high flying drone.

As I have followed the blogs of other nomads over the past ten years I have often read about hikes taken in the area we are currently in to a location up in the hills where someone has built a giant stone snake in the sand, and it has remained untouched for years.  Our friend Linda advised that location was just a short hike from our boondock site, so we made arrangements to congregate in front of our coach around 1100 hours to take the hike and try to find this stone serpent.....

Our hiking group sans Steven who took the picture

Making our way up the nicely marked trail

  

.....the trail began just a couple hundred yards from our site and the trail was pretty easy to follow.  Within 30 minutes we had reached the location of the famous stone serpent......in the first picture it doesn't look that big, so Steven added perspective with this second shot.....

.....yup, that stone serpent is pretty large and menacing.......there were a number of other sculptures that were either finished, or in progress.  Apparently your job if you make the hike is to add to the unfinished ones........this bird head is finished......very cool.....

.....this ram's head is outlined, but not yet finished.....

.....of course, every group activity deserves its own 'usie'............

.....there are our coaches way down below.........

 In all we hiked about 1.5 miles......not that far, but the reward was great.  We plan to revisit the serpent sculpture over the next few days (after the forecast rain) and continue on the trail to higher elevations.

We were back to our homes on wheels around 1230 and parted ways until our semi regular sunset fire at 1630 hours.....I say 'semi regular' as the forecast shows rain for the next two to three days beginning Tuesday, so we will see what we get and react accordingly.....one thing of concern is there are flash flood warnings in effect in our area until 2200 hours Wednesday evening.  We did choose our location with that in mind, and we are NOT near any flood channels, so not to worry in case you were.

Of course, since we are boondocking and relying somewhat heavily on sunny days to recharge our house batteries, the heavy cloud cover which is forecast for the next few days will present some challenges in that area.  When we arrived Sunday it was cloudy and we only got back to 97% on our batteries.  Monday we only got back to 95%, so you can see the trend.  On the other hand with only the 2 panels we had last year at this time we would not have gotten back to even 90%.  It is amazing we can charge even with cloud cover.  Our friends Steven and Linda actually got back to 100% on Monday, but they have over 800 watts of panels on their roof.  

I spent the afternoon finishing my setup for our extended stay here in the Borrego Springs desert......wheel covers installed, malibu lights deployed, awning anchor ropes installed (in case of wind), awning mat tacked down to the ground, small Honda generator deployed to help with recharging as it will be very cloudy for a few days.

Since no rain was in the offing for Monday we had our 'semi regular' sunset fire beginning at 1630 hours.........

.....we sat talking until about 1730 hours and called it an evening........TLE made her famous chili earlier in the day, so she heated it up for dinner, which I chased with a cold brew.

It was a good day......a day lived well with good friends in an amazing location.....thanks for stopping by!