White Canyon Wilderness

I've been making Gary climb to the top of this or the top of that for years now. He suggested that we go someplace that wasn't vertical or miles and miles of hiking. I thought the hike up the canyon in White Canyon Wilderness might be perfect. It isn't vertical (well, the sides are, but you don't climb those) and you can't go very far before it gets too difficult (at least for me) to go any further. With a 4wd truck, I could park at the start of the trail, too, instead of a mile or so back. On top of all that, it's very scenic.

I signed in at the register and there were notes there about cairns and purple dots. When I had been there before, cairns were next to nonexistent and there were no purple dots. Anyway, we followed the purple dots and it turned out to be my easiest hike up that canyon. I don't think we saw quite as much in the way of pools of water or small waterfalls, but somebody from Houston probably isn't as obsessive about pools of water as somebody that has lived in the desert during a drought for 10 years.

The trail went through places like this, to the side of the main channel, where walking is easy and doesn't involve climbing over boulders or hoping over water.

We were there early in the day, which is good if you don't want half of a picture in darkness and half extremely bright.

Gary by a small waterfall and extremely white rock. I didn't know he was also taking a picture at the time.

There were flowers all over the place. The water was flowing but was underground at least half of the time. The pools were wonderfully cool.

One of many pools of cool, cool water. There were waterbugs and I hear that they bite, so I didn't want to go wading.

Here's a large stone "paddle" that looks like it's smiling. I don't think it would be easy to get into a position where you could photograph it with a blue background.

I like the way this picture turned out.

It was pretty easy following the purple dots up the canyon. I had more trouble on the way back and wandered from the trail several times. I think that if I had been going where I thought I should go instead of looking for purple dots, I might not have overshot the truck by several hundred feet. If you look closely at the pictures, I think I got the purple dots in a couple of them.

2013_04_05