Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Hole-in-the-Wall CG, Mojave Natl Preserve, CA - Feb 27-28
We finally made it to California. Visiting CA is like visiting another country. Two countries, in fact: everything here is more expensive, but the roads are third world. The day after we drove into CA the weather turned cold & wet.This campground is set in a beautiful location, has a large number of sites, and no hook-ups. The sites are large & level, since the cg was built only about 10 years ago. It is reasonably priced at $10/day ($5 for Golden Age).
The day we arrived we had time to walk the Nature Trail to the Visitor Center, have a nice chat with the volunteer there (it would be a great place to volunteer), and walk the 1-mile Rings Trail, named for the rings set into the rocks to help you climb out of the slot canyon at the end of the loop. The slot canyon is named Banshee for the howling sounds the wind makes blowing through the Swiss-cheese-like rock formations. The next morning was cold and rainy, a good day for a cave tour.Mojave Natl Preserve is a 1.6-million-acre park encompassing much of the Mojave Desert, but also including areas that transit to the Sonoran and Great Basin Deserts. The park also surrounds the Providence Mtn State Recreation Area including Mitchell Caverns Natural Preserve, home to the only known limestone caverns in CA. 90-minute cavern tours are $4/person, which is quite reasonable (Governator hasn't found these yet). There are two main rooms; most of the really cool formations are in the first room or the tunnel between. The second room was used by prehistoric tribes for storage and religious ceremonies. It also was used in the film "The Doors", where crew-members surreptitiously painted glyphs on the walls. Traces of these are still visible despite attempts to remove them. After the tour we went on a scenic drive around the preserve.
# posted by Doug and Willie @ 10:05 PM 
