Hiking the wash

In the spirit of continuing exploration we set out this morning for another hike in our "backyard". It is a rugged place and although we do some "hacking" on horseback, there are places where horses just cannot go: too steep, too rocky, too overgrown. Today's hike had all three of these features. It started off benign enough: it is a wash we do visit with the horses, but we know from experience that on horseback you can only go so far.


Washes are one of my favorite destinations; there is a lot of different vegetation and here the rocks are awesome. The wash runs along a ridge of puddingrock which is a sedimentary rock consisting of all kinds of other rocks. Within one rock you can see purple, pink, white, green, and sometimes the rocks are squeezed like toothpaste.




We knew of this bee hive along the bank as we had seen it on horseback, and even though it is early February, the bees were getting active.




At some points the wash cuts through rather flat surroundings, but the walls are high and crumbly and have caved in, making the going on horseback impossible. We climbed over one such spot where we had to turn around before and came to some cataracts where the water had polished these beautiful rocks. In the summer the water must really thunder through these mountains, but it is so dry and permeable that when you visit the next day there are some puddles, but there is no residual flow.


Just beyond the cataracts the vegetation became too much, so we stopped for a snack and Emma found a perfectly intact small skull of a carnivore. We looked on the Web and agreed it is possibly a small kit fox skull. How cool is that!