On Saturday night we camped at the Temple Bar campground at Lake Mead. Well, near Lake Mead. It was a nice enough campsite, but there wasn’t really much to do other than boating.

So on Sunday morning we packed everything up (so we could give another campground a shot that night), and headed to the White Rock Canyon/Arizona Hot Springs hike. This is the route, from US-93 all the way to the Colorado River. It’s a solid 3 miles to the hot springs, and then 3 miles uphill, through the gravel wash, the whole way back.

We soaked in our bathing suits for a good long while, ate lunch, and took care not to get the water in our noses:

Naegleria fowleria, an amoeba common to thermal pools, may be present and could enter through the nose causing a rare infection and death. Do not dive into pools, splash water, or submerge your head.

Yikes! So far, still alive.

We hiked out of the canyon with the sun at our backs, made it across Hoover Dam in bumper to bumper traffic, and decided to try our luck Sunday night at the Las Vegas Bay campground. Apparently our luck had run out.

That night the winds picked up, and were threatening to blow our tent away. We tied it down with heavy rocks and hoped for the worst to pass, but when we got in the tent to see how it felt from the inside, we discovered everything was covered with a visible layer of sand. It had managed to blow in through the mesh sides of the tent, even with the rainfly on.

Well that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. In any other circumstances we could have endured it, but with Las Vegas less than an hour away, we packed it all up as fast as we could—not easy to take down a tent with winds gusting up to 20mph—and headed for the Golden Nugget.

Stephanie got a great shot of me posing with my pristine new Vasque Mantra Gore-Tex XCRs before we took off down White Rock Canyon. They’re totally awesome.

Man, we couldn’t have hoped for better (read: crazier) conditions. Woke up Sunday morning to find at least a foot of snow had dumped on us (and was still coming). Which was a catalyst for a number of firsts.

First time I had to dig a car out of the snow.

Props to Stephanie for the shoveling action-shot!

First time I had to put chains on a tire

Thankfully our Zipcar came complete with tire chains and some cold weather gear (scraper, shovel, etc). This was a total surprise to us—we’d heard that the all-wheel-drive Honda Elements had been outfitted with chains last year, but when I emailed Zipcar to confirm whether this was still the case, they responded with typical customer-service-ese: “I’m sorry we do not supply tire chains in our cars.” I guess that’s just a case of national reps being out of touch with local reality.

We stopped at the grocery store to pick up some things for breakfast and lunch, and then headed out of Weed back toward Mount Shasta City.

On I-5 the conditions were nearly whiteout. Apparently the interstate had been closed that morning, and anyone still on the road was going 25mph—which felt fast. We were very very happy we “splurged” and stuck with the slightly more expensive Honda Element, rather than a front-wheel drive sedan. It always felt solid and attached to the road.

On the way to the Nordic Center, it was hard to tell where the road ended and the snow began.

The air was so saturated with snowflakes, it was difficult to take pictures (for fear of getting water in the camera). But when we stopped for lunch after about an hour of snowshoeing, I managed to get a few snaps of us on the trail.

This is the main “groomed” trail of the Nordic Center (which is normally reserved for cross-country skiers). They’d gotten so much snow over the night (over 2 feet), we would have been waist deep on the ungroomed snowshoe trails. So they let us tromp around on the edge of this trail instead.

We were thinking about getting out to some snow after New Years, but in the end we stuck a little closer to home, heading back to Point Lobos instead.

We stayed until sunset.

We went down to Joshua Tree National Park over the long Thanksgiving weekend, which is becoming something of a tradition for us (see Thanksgiving at MacKerricher, Thanksgiving at Lassen). This was our campsite, complete with joshua trees.

We met up at the park with our friends Julie, Patrice, and their daughter Eva. They drove separately but camped and cooked out with us for two of the three nights we were there.

Here’s a panorama of Hidden Valley, our hike on Friday. I didn’t know what to expect from Joshua Tree (other than joshua trees). Turns out it’s well known (especially among climbers) for its piles of eroded granite rocks. Everywhere we looked we saw people on rocks, some professional, some just goofing off—like us.

Hidden Valley panorama

On Saturday we hiked out to the Fortynine Palms Oasis. Along the way, two tarantulas crossed our paths!

Compared to the hot desert sun (even in late November), it felt air conditioned in the shade of the palms. We all sat down to eat our well-earned sandwiches. It was a mile and a half to the oasis, with about 300 feet of elevation gain and loss just getting there—which we’d repeat on the way out.