Welcome to the Desert:)

We are officially in the desert! The desert is an interesting place. I would never want to live here, but it is a great place to visit. We went to the small town of Campo because they are supposed to have a pretty cool railroad museum, but the museum was closed and there really wasn’t much else to do in the town.  We asked a local what else there was to do in town, but there wasn’t anything else. I guess that can be expected when you are in the desert. We decided to stay at a campground not too far from Campo called Sacred Rocks Reserve.  It was a very well kept campground with nice bathrooms and great hiking trails. 

When ever I think about hiking I think about mountains, dirt and tall trees, but that is probably because I'm from Northern California. In Nor Cal there are an abundance of great mountain hikes with tons of beautiful greenery surrounding you as you hike up a mountain. Well, when you're in the desert there is a lot of dirt with mostly hills to hike and an abundance of boulders. Oh, yeah there are also cactus' and lots of shrubbery. Although, it is not as beautiful as the Sierra's, it still has a beauty of it's own; I think I might be bias to Northern California. 

Hiking

The highlight of the desert for me so far has been visiting the Desert View Tower in Jacumba, CA The Tower was built as a monument for all the pioneers who were able to cross the treacherous desert lands. It was built in the 1800s and it is four stories high built from stone. The view from the top is amazing. Next to the tower is a boulder cave that has carvings in the rocks dating back 500 years ago. The guy running the place said there were hot springs further up the hill, about a five minute hike. Alex and I followed the signs for the springs up the hill and about five minutes into the hike we come to a place with a bunch of rocks. Strangely, there were some metal springs attached to the rocks. I kind of joked and said, "Oh, look Hot Springs." pointing to the metal springs that someone attached to boulder. Alex and I giggled a bit and then kept hiking up the hill. Well, there were no more signs for the springs and there was no sign of hot water springs anywhere.  Very funny....the metal springs we saw were the "Hot Springs." I thought that was pretty clever, but I could see someone not thinking it was very funny. I guess it depends on your sense of humor. 

View of the desert from the tower

Can you see the face?

Boulder Cave

After the Desert tower we made our way to El Centro, CA. It is not the greatest town. It smells like sulfur and cow manure, and they have every chain restaurant and shopping store you can think of. It was nice to have some familiarity, but it doesn't make the place very interesting. We saw the movie "Country Song" while we were there and it was a pretty decent movie.

We are going to the see the Salton Sea and Salvation Mountain tomorrow. Salvation Mountain was in that movie "Into the Wild." I'm pretty excited about seeing it.