By Cameron

We should have started this hike earlier.  That’s for sure.  But, hey, isn’t that always the case?

This is probably still the hardest hike we’ve ever done.  The Cottonwood hike was super hard.  But this was harder.

Kyle and I had rolled in much later than everyone else to the camp near Ubehebe Mine.  3am was when we finally got in and got the tent setup so we could bed down.  My Jeep had a new lift kit that has remained quite “bouncy” to this day.  The washboards on the way to the mine were enough to shake out one’s fillings.  I was ready for sleep when we rolled in.

We awoke the next morning to a beautiful day.  The sun was shining, weather just perfect.  Not too cold, not too hot.  We had breakfast and were getting ready.  Edric had planned to hike originally, but had…indulged… too much the night before.  Kyle really wanted to hike himself, so Edric yielded to him and chose to drive my Jeep to the rendezvous point instead.

The morning sailed past us, and we didn’t get on the trail till after 11:00 am.  I remember as we set off that Joaquin, my dog, was a little hesitant.  He didn’t seem like he really wanted to go.  But I wanted him to.  I wanted to get to hike and bond with him.  I considered asking Edric to take him in the Jeep with him, wavered a bit, then decided to take Joaquin with us.  Wrong choice, ended up.

This was a hike through the Last Chance Mountain Range from Ubehebe Mine to Saline Valley.  There was no real trail.  Washes were the closest thing, and they worked quite well.  We had studied the topo maps, and it looked very do-able.  The descent at the end looked steep, but we’d handled that before and always found a route ok.  In reality, that was part of the attraction. 
this was not the beaten path.  This was the road less-travelled, and that’s a lot of what we liked about it.  Recounting our hike later to an old-timer we met at the hot-springs named “Death Valley Dave,” we had some degree of pride when we told him we’d hiked through the Last Chance range and he responded with, “Wow, I haven’t done that one yet.” 
 
But we’d find later why having a trail can be really nice.

We hiked through the day: Dan, Kyle, Stuart, Joaquin and me.  It was a great hike.  Down washes, over sloping hillsides.  We compared GPS features.  Mine a wrist-top Garmin ForeTrex.  Dan’s an ancient Trimble Scout (one of the first consumer GPS units ever produced).  We saw an interesting field where it looked like volcanic eruptions had landed magma bombs here.  One curiously looked like a hand.

We climbed up the hill to the ridge.  At the ridge line, the views were spectacular, but the going was slower.  Having no trail, it was unclear the simplest path.  It had quite a bit of scrambling.  Scrambling is fine for me, but Joaquin didn’t care for it.  I had to coax him across quite a bit of it.  Helping him see the path where he could walk.  It was slowing me down quite a bit.  Everyone was substantially ahead of me.  It was clear that he was tiring of the journey, and we weren’t half way there yet.

Did I mention that we weren’t sure the road to Saline Valley would be open?  We’d heard reports that the road was dicey, so we weren’t sure Mark, Edric and Chris could make it there.  We were hiking this distance hoping we’d have someone on the other side to meet us.  When we got to the ridge, we attempted to raise mark on our handheld ham radios.  No luck at first.

The sun was beginning its descent as we approached the summit.  I remember watching the glowing orb wondering if I could reach the summit before it set.  When I was younger, I recall seeing a movie called, “Against a Crooked Sky,” where a man’s sister was captured by Native Americans and he had to cross an area on foot and reach a certain summit before the sun set to save her life.

I was tired and Joaquin was tired and the sun was setting.  My eye was on the setting sun as I pushed harder and harder to reach the summit.  I realized that walking wasn’t going to get me there.  So I ran the last 100 feet or so just as the last glow of direct sunlight left the summit.  I did it.  I reached the summit before the sun set.  I was more successful than the character in the movie.

In the dusk that remained, we all took a break.  Drank some water, ate a little, took some glory pictures.  We finally reached Mark on the HT’s.  Ahh, what a relief.  All down-hill from here.

How true that was.

Did I mention there was no trail?  Did I mention that the sun had just set.  This meant we would be descending in the dark.  OK, we’d done that before.  When we hiked into Butte Valley, we did that, and we got down ok.

As it ends up, this was quite a bit steeper.  Quite a bit.  Our journey, as it was, had just begun…

Dan was, of course, chief navigator with Stuart helping.  He had a knack for it.  But without light to compare features to the topo map, it was hard to navigate.  None of us had a GPS with actual mapping in it.  That might have helped.  As it was, we did our best.  Luckily, I had brought along a small LED diving flashlight which was very very bright.  Dan was able to use it to scout the terrain features and attempt navigation.  It was a bit hit or miss.  Many times, he thought he’d found a path down, only to find that when we followed it, it sloped down to near vertical.  So we’d hike back up to look some more.

Eventually, the best that could be found was what I can only call a “boulder slide” that we could descend.  It was a descent comprised of 3-foot diameter boulders.  This was actually fine for us humans.  But Joaquin didn’t like it at all. (you can see his eyes reflecting in the flash of my camera)  I swear he looked at me and said, “You’ve got to be kidding me.  We’re going down this?”  To which I replied, “Sorry buddy, this is the best we got.  We’ll get down together, ok?”

This began my several hour experience of, “C’mon Joaquin!  Good boy!  You can do it.  Come on, Buddy!  That’s right.  Good boy!  You can do it!”  This series of phrases was what I reiterated in a constant stream for hours.  No exaggeration.  It doesn’t seem like a big deal, but you’d be surprised.  Try it out.  I’m not saying it was harder on me than Joaquin.  He was really scared and did his best.  It was hard for both of us.

After the rocks, we had to slide down a seriously steep dirt slope.  Joaquin had had enough.  All the coaxing in the world could not get him to descend down that slope.  So I did the only thing I could.  I picked him up and cradled him in my arms and slid down the slope on my butt.  Joaquin is an 85 pound dog.  Not small.  And when he felt me sliding down the slope, he freaked.  He began to wiggle violently to get out of my grip.  I managed to hold on to him till we got to the bottom, but neither of us enjoyed it, I can tell you.

Thankfully, however, this was the end of the major descent.  We were down.  Now all that was left was to cross what the GPS told us was a long flat stroll to the rendezvous point along Saline Valley Road.  This was sort of true.  In reality there were little bumps we had to cross, washes 6-feet deep, etc.  Not a huge deal.  But after hiking what we just did, for 14 hours, another hour of hiking that was enough to make you into a zombie.

Mark, our hero, was patiently waiting at the rendezvous point along the road.  We now had easy radio contact with him over our handheld radios.  But it was really easy to lose bearing in the dark, so we would periodically ask him to flash his headlights to make sure we were headed straight to him.  None of us wanted to extend the hike due to getting off-track.

That flat walk along the washes took at least an hour of zombie walking.  When we reached Mark in Dan’s truck, we were all so bloody relieved!  I remember laughing because Joaquin, who is usually a bit reluctant to get into the Jeep, jumped in the back of the truck and bedded down instantly.  We piled in, Dan in the front seat, the rest of us in the truck-bed, and we sailed to camp.

It was 3am, but we still made our steak dinner and downed it greedily.  I had promised Joaquin half my steak, and I kept my promise.  He’d earned steak.  We all had.