The plan is to eat breakfast out and then head on to some hiking. When we left the restaurant, we both felt chilly, chilly enough to decide to head back to the RV to get another layer to put over our hiking shirts. Then onward.
Some hikes are long, some are high, some are both but some are just for fun and today’s ladder hike is for fun. It’s in a section of badlands southeast of Palm Springs where the hills are folded, wrinkled and full of slot canyons. It’s also right on the boundary of the North American Plate where the San Andreas fault converges with several other fault lines. Over millions of years these fault lines have created a tortured landscape uplifting some hills and creating cracks, some of which widen into large washes with every rain and some which are in harder rock and form slot canyons. The cliffs look like huge solidified mud plates with rocks layers stuck in them.
Doesn’t this all sound like exciting territory to hike in? Well, probably not but these hills have a beauty all their own and the hiking is unusual enough to attract many. We drove down the washboard road with out teeth rattling in our head only to be slowed by the deeper sand nearer the wide sandy swath called a ‘parking lot’. We parked between two Canadian cars near 6 other cars.
Amazing how many Canadians we meet on the trails. I will admit that there are a lot of Canadians in the desert Southwest but it seems as if we meet more Canadians on the trails than Americans. Today, as were getting out of the car, the 4 Canadians in the car next to us were getting ready also. We hiked with them for an hour through the first series of slots but, when they turned back and we were hiking on, we met up with two other Canadians and finished the hike with them. We’ve met so many that I can tell a Canadian accent. Eh? And, we all had the same map from the same book, ‘140 Great Hikes in Palm Springs.’
We got our packs on and decided that it was warm enough to take the legs of our pants off. Hey, is this the same couple who went back to their RV for warmer clothing? Yep. wasted trip. We set off with the 4 from the other car, 3 adults and an 8-yr old boy, Dev. He was full of energy and this is a great trail for kids to scramble over rocks, under boulders and up the ladders. He was always ahead of us.
This is really a unique hike for this area since most slot canyons are in Utah. The slot sections are narrow and twisty, you can’t see 6 feet ahead in parts. Then there are the ladders which climb up some 10 - 12’ walls in the slot. The ladders are put there by volunteers and are in differing conditions. Sometimes, the rains create flooding in the canyon and the ladders are broken. The first one we hit was wooden and was missing the bottom 3 rungs but we could put our feet into the cutouts where the rungs had been. Then, there was this large boulder over us, wedged in the slot but so close above us on the ladder that I had to lay on the ladder so I and my pack could get under the boulder. Pretty tight.
The rest of the ladders were not so precarious and we all climbed them easily. After a mile in the slot and having climbed 5 ladders, we came out of the slot onto the top of one of the cliffs. Here we found a LARGE cairn.
Looks like everyone who had passed this way had put their own rock here. The other 4 turned back at this point but we hiked on, looking for the alternate way back so we could make a circle. This is where we met the other 2 hikers. We all had some trouble finding the trail, agreeing that the trail description is sometimes a bit vague. But, we bushwhacked and scrambled down a cliff face and headed back out the large wash that was there. Note the crack in the rock below. It probably won’t fall for thousands of years but I avoided walking near it.
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