Back to back......

7:50 am - Monday - December 20th - Anza Borrego Desert, CA - 40° F (was 29° F when we woke up at 6:30 am), 28% humidity, wind 2 mph out of the north.....partly cloudy today with a forecast high of 69° F (a 40° temp differential today).  On this date in 2014 we were enjoying our first Ventura, CA sunset/happy hour in 3 years.....Rincon Parkway......↴

.....the sunrise this morning......

When the outside temp gets below 30° F it takes our 3 Suburban gas furnaces about 30 minutes to make the Newell interior life sustaining first thing in the morning.  We purposely sleep with no heaters running regardless of whether we are hooked up to shore power, or boondocking/dry camping (except when we were at the Grand Canyon a few years ago when we never turned off the portable fireplace during the day, or at night for most of our stay).  When boondocking running the gas heaters all night would severely drain the batteries, but that is not our reason for not utilizing them at night.  We've always preferred to sleep with no heaters, or for that matter, no A/C running at night.....we just sleep better.  When it gets this cold TLE adds a flannel blanket to our normal bed spread, and blanket, and that seems to do the trick.  However, when one must exit the warmth of the bed to turn on the heaters it can be quite uncomfortable for the 30 seconds, or so it takes to do so.  I (of course it's me who turns on the heaters) jump back into bed and stay there for at least 30 minutes cuddling with TLE before it's warm enough to get up for good.

After our great hike Saturday up to the Rock Snake we wanted to take another hike. Back to back hikes are rare for us, but we felt so good after our 3 mile hike that wanted to do another.... this time one which we had not attempted previously.  When we went to dump our tanks last Friday at Palm Canyon Campground we were given a park map showing at least two hikes which interested us.  One of them was the Palm Canyon trail which takes you to sort of a palm tree oasis.  By 11 am Sunday it was warm enough to hike, so we drove the 9+ miles over to the Anza Borrego State Park Visitors Center to pick up a trail map, and begin our hike. The actual Palm Canyon Trail is 1.5 miles each way for a total of 3 round trip miles, but we decided to access the trailhead, which is about 1 mile up the canyon from the campground, from the Visitors Center.  After paying our $9 day use fee (that's the Senior Discount rate) we began our hike utilizing the .6 mile paved path over to the campground, then walked another mile north, into the canyon, to the trailhead .......

The trailhead

......the actual hike up to the palm tree oasis took us about 30 minutes over a pretty easy trail.  We arrived at the oasis around 12 noon.....

....normally you would be able to walk down to the water, but sometime in the last year someone started a fire near the palm trees which got out of control, and burned them....

.....they are still living trees, but the park service has eliminated access for the foreseeable future until the trees recover sufficiently.  We spent about 15 minutes resting, and eating a snack before beginning the walk back to the Visitors Center.  

The trail is nicely constructed and maintained with rock steps, where needed, created by the trail crews years ago.....

....there is an alternate return trail you can take which provides much better views of the valley.  It's a little rockier, and longer, but it is well worth the effort.....we liked this trail even more than the main trail.....

.....we were back at the car around 2 pm to find we had hiked over 6 miles....double WOW for us!.....

.....we covered 6.03 miles in all at an average speed of 2.4 mph, burning 1,083 calories, in about 2 hours 31 minutes of 'moving time' with 660 feet of elevation gain.

We arrived back at base camp around 2:30 pm with big, very tired smiles upon our faces.  That is the farthest we have hiked in over a year, and we did just fine.  No complaints were heard, just gratefulness being expressed that we can still pound out the miles when we wish.

We chose to forego a sunset fire, but I managed to catch the actual sunset, and the attending afterglow.....

.....thanks for stopping by!

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