Playing the slots....

7:15 am - PST - Thursday - 51º F, 54% humidity, wind 4 mph out of WNW.....partly cloudy, but we should get plenty of sun today to recharge our batteries to 100% once again!

Wednesday was a gloriously sunny, balmy day.....a perfect day for a hike.....based on the title you probably thought we went gambling.....well, sometimes I feel like we are gambling when we hike slot canyons.  Why does it feel like gambling......well continue reading.

Last year TLE, along with our friend Michael took a short hike to check out the slot canyons about 10 miles from our location, but didn't get very far into them, so we decided to pick up where they stopped and go as far as we could.  We headed out in the VW for the 10 mile drive east on S-22  around 10:15 am to the trailhead arriving there around 10:25.

The first 7/10's of a mile of the hike was up a very wide wash, which eventually led us to the entrance of the slot canyons below.........

......in the first 100 feet we came to this stone arch.........very cool......

.....and then it just got better and better.  Whenever we hike slot canyons I am always thinking "....what if there is a flash flood, and how would we escape its torrential waters?", so I am always looking for an escape route.  On a day like Wednesday where there was no forecast of rain anywhere within a 50 mile radius so we were safe, but I always feel like we are gambling, even on a very clear day.   Whenever hiking slot canyons you need to know the weather conditions in the area......it can be raining 10 miles away in the mountains, but be totally sunny where you are hiking......that rain has to go somewhere, and that somewhere may be the slot canyon in which you are hiking.....

It's getting narrower!

 We came upon this randomly growing ocotillo tree....the only vegetation we saw the entire hike

 

 .....and narrower.....not a place for the claustrophobic! 

.....the entire slot canyon hike was about 1.2 miles round trip.....seems much longer when you are in a very confined area.  By the time we had returned to the trailhead we had covered about 3 miles in total, and it was about 12:30 pm......just getting into the heat of the day.

We were back home before 1 pm, and settling into our afternoon routines.....reading and napping.  I spent some time rewiring our Sony dashboard radio so that it draws its power from the house batteries, and not the chassis batteries.  Why do that you might ask?  Well, when we are dry camping/boondocking the house batteries get recharged every day by our solar panels.  We try to run the generators as little as possible relying upon the sun to recharge our house batteries.  The chassis batteries only get charged when we are driving down the road via the alternator, or when the big generator is being run, so if we are listening to the radio a lot over the course of a couple of two, or three weeks they can run down unless we are running the big generator, which we do not wish to do.  In all it took just under an hour to run the new wire, and then connect everything.....now we can listen to the radio as much as we wish without worrying about the chassis batteries being run down!

As I have written previously, the sun goes behind the local mountains about 5 pm, but the actual sunset time is around 5:30......I am struck by the clarity of the air every day we have been here, and by how much greenery there is......it has been a wet winter in the desert for sure.

Thanks for stopping by!