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Hiking the Kelso Dunes
Dec. 27th, 2022 06:31 am5 Days in the Desert travelog #11
Kelso, CA - Sun, 25 Dec 2022, 11:30am
It's Christmas! And if you're like us and don't celebrate Christmas you find something else fun to do instead. For us that's going hiking. Especially somewhere warm. How about a desert? We're in the Mojave Desert of California this Christmas. Our Christmas morning hike is at Kelso Dunes.
The Kelso Dunes are a field of sand dunes that reach a height of about 650 feet above the surrounding terrain. Yes, that's tall for sand dunes. They're not quite the tallest in North America, though. The Great Sand Dunes in Colorado reach 750 feet tall. But at 650' these are still darn tall. It's obvious from the trailhead 1.5 miles from the peak, that's a lot of sand.
Rather than start with a shot of the dunes from the base of the trail I'll jump into the middle of the trek. Photographs from the base don't do justice to the awesomess of the spectacle. Instead here's a shot (above) from about 3/4 mile in, where we both said, "Wow! What a great view." The mountains in the distance are the Providence Mountains.
At this point we'd ascended maybe 150 feet, about 1/4 of the elevation to the top. Up to here the climb had been fairly gentle. Past this point it got a bit steeper.
Now it makes sense to show a picture of the tallest dune.
The picture above shows the highest point of the dunes.
As we were trekking up this middle part of the route we weren't sure how far we'd go. There isn't really a trail, per se. There's just the footprints of people who climbed on previous days plus our (considerable) ability to read terrain. We were picking what looked like the most passable route to the top but we weren't sure if it would get too steep or dangerous. And yes, it did get steeper.
"Let's at least get to that saddle point," we agreed. It's a spot between the two highest ridges in the dunes. The pic above shows the lower of those two ridges. Again in the background are the Providence Mountains.
Hawk snapped this pic of me admiring the view in the pic above:
From here we made a decision about whether to press onward. I decided to go at least a little farther, 100 meters or so, as the trail looked easily passable. Hawk was hurting from an unrelated injury exacerbated by plodding through loose sand and thought it'd be better to wait for me.
Now here's a view across the lower expanse of the dune field. It was heartening to see how far we'd already come. The trailhead is at the end of that little sandy spur about 1/3 of the way in and down from the upper-right corner of the frame.
We'd come so far... but the summit still beckoned!
To be continued....
Update: video from the summit in my next blog!
Kelso, CA - Sun, 25 Dec 2022, 11:30am
It's Christmas! And if you're like us and don't celebrate Christmas you find something else fun to do instead. For us that's going hiking. Especially somewhere warm. How about a desert? We're in the Mojave Desert of California this Christmas. Our Christmas morning hike is at Kelso Dunes.
The Kelso Dunes are a field of sand dunes that reach a height of about 650 feet above the surrounding terrain. Yes, that's tall for sand dunes. They're not quite the tallest in North America, though. The Great Sand Dunes in Colorado reach 750 feet tall. But at 650' these are still darn tall. It's obvious from the trailhead 1.5 miles from the peak, that's a lot of sand.
Rather than start with a shot of the dunes from the base of the trail I'll jump into the middle of the trek. Photographs from the base don't do justice to the awesomess of the spectacle. Instead here's a shot (above) from about 3/4 mile in, where we both said, "Wow! What a great view." The mountains in the distance are the Providence Mountains.
At this point we'd ascended maybe 150 feet, about 1/4 of the elevation to the top. Up to here the climb had been fairly gentle. Past this point it got a bit steeper.
Now it makes sense to show a picture of the tallest dune.
The picture above shows the highest point of the dunes.
As we were trekking up this middle part of the route we weren't sure how far we'd go. There isn't really a trail, per se. There's just the footprints of people who climbed on previous days plus our (considerable) ability to read terrain. We were picking what looked like the most passable route to the top but we weren't sure if it would get too steep or dangerous. And yes, it did get steeper.
"Let's at least get to that saddle point," we agreed. It's a spot between the two highest ridges in the dunes. The pic above shows the lower of those two ridges. Again in the background are the Providence Mountains.
Hawk snapped this pic of me admiring the view in the pic above:
From here we made a decision about whether to press onward. I decided to go at least a little farther, 100 meters or so, as the trail looked easily passable. Hawk was hurting from an unrelated injury exacerbated by plodding through loose sand and thought it'd be better to wait for me.
Now here's a view across the lower expanse of the dune field. It was heartening to see how far we'd already come. The trailhead is at the end of that little sandy spur about 1/3 of the way in and down from the upper-right corner of the frame.
We'd come so far... but the summit still beckoned!
To be continued....
Update: video from the summit in my next blog!
