How I Spent New Year's Eve

Hawk and I took a fairly low-key approach to New Year's Eve this year. We decided weeks ago not to travel. That turns out to have been a prescient decision given all the chaos with extreme weather, flight delays/cancellation, and an operational meltdown with Southwest Airlines, the carrier we likely would have traveled. Instead we visited with friends locally.

This afternoon we drove an hour (give or take) to visit some friends in the area. One of them is very sick and needs the company— when he has energy for it. His spouse needs support, too. We had a good visit today and played a boardgame together.

Even the hour long drive to/from their house got dicey today. We're having heavy rain in the SF Bay Area. It was only a cautionary situation as we drove out to visit them around lunchtime. Cautionary, as in drive cautiously because it's raining. But by the time we left their house at 4:30 there were numerous road closures due to flooding, washouts, and downed trees. UPDATE: San Francisco received 5.46 inches of rainfall on Saturday, a historic amount that nearly broke the record for the rainiest day since modern record keeping began in 1849.

As we were driving home Hawk reached out to friends of ours who were hosting games at their house today. It turns out they canceled the games party because too many people were taking a raincheck... literally, in some cases. We suggested an impromptu NYE gathering at our house instead.

"I don't think we'll stay up 'til midnight," I explained. "We're old. But celebrating New Year's with the ball drop in New York at 9pm Eastern seems too early. Maybe we'll celebrate it with Chicago at 10pm, when they drop a convicted politician from the Sears Tower."

Our impromptu low-key party worked well. We had 4 guests over, for 6 of us total. We played a lighthearted game for a while, celebrated a toast with Chicago at 10pm, then kept on playing and socializing until midnight locally, and did a second toast.

What, What Happened to Tuesday in the Desert?

5 Days in the Desert travelog #24
Barstow, CA - Wed, 28 Dec 2022, 8am

If you've been paying attention to the datelines on my "5 Days in the Desert" journals— okay, just pretend you are— you might have noticed after writing multiple blogs about outdoorsy stuff on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, I wrote basically nothing about Tuesday. "Wait, what happened on Tuesday in the desert??" you might ask. The answer, alas, is Not much.

Tuesday was a poor weather day. It was cloudy all day, and it rained in the afternoon. We almost never get a trip of this length with perfect weather (or even passable weather) the whole time. There's almost always a day or two lost to poor conditions.

We knew a little bit in advance Tuesday's weather was going to suck. We pushed to do so much on Sunday and Monday because of that. We didn't just give up on yesterday, though. We did some 4x4 driving/exploring up through lunchtime. We came back to the hotel in the afternoon and took it easy for the rest of the day. That turned out to be a needed break, anyway. Hawk had some work emergencies she was able to help deal with by working 2 hours in the afternoon, and I just appreciated the downtime. I've been doing nearly all the driving so far, over 1,200 miles already!

Well, now it's Wednesday morning. The rain is over and it looks like it'll be sunny today. We've considered different options about where to go hiking today, on our way home— including whether to extend our trip an extra day. Yesterday's rain adds risk to the terrain for lots of hikes and/or 4x4 roads in the desert. Thus we've decided to go hiking in a part of the desert that actually didn't get rain yesterday, Trona Pinnacles. We'll head out as soon as we finish packing our bags & check out.

Trona Pinnacles

5 Days in the Desert travelog #25
Ridgecrest, CA - Wed, 28 Dec 2022, 1pm

We're close to wrapping up our "5 Days in the Desert" trip. Today we're headed home, but first with a detour to visit Trona Pinnacles just southwest of Death Valley. We've been wanting to visit the Trona Pinnacles for years, but it seems that each time we're in Death Valley there just isn't quite enough time to get over here. Thus we tacked it on to the end of this trip. It was an easy drive from Barstow to the town of Ridgecrest, California this morning. From there it was about a 15 mile drive out of town to reach the access road, then a 5 mile drive on dirt and gravel roads.



So, what are the Trona Pinnacles? They're a set of tufa spires, tufa being a calcium carbonate formation created underwater. Yes, underwater. This desert basin at about 1,800 feet elevation used to be 700 feet underwater. At the end of the last Ice Age, glaciers from the Sierra Nevada melted and formed a huge inland sea. What's left of it today is the mostly dry Searles Lake, several miles north of here.



The main access road to Trona Pinnacles is accessible to orindary passenger cars. There's also a short driving loop. There's a hiking loop, too, plus a number of shorter trail up to & around the various tufa formations.



We had fun hoofing it through the main clusters of formations. After that we drove into one of the other sets of formations. The roads to this other part of the park are rougher and require 4wd and/or higher clearance to avoid getting stuck. Here's a video from the 4x4 trail:

Watch on YouTube

Now it's time to head home. Well, after we finish eating lunch in Ridgecrest it's time to head home.

Wrapping Up 5 Days in the Desert

5 Days in the Desert travelog #26
Back home - Wed, 28 Dec 2022, 11pm

We arrived home from our 5 Days in the Desert trip this evening at 10pm. It's been a long day. Though we took it a bit easy this morning, not checking out from the hotel until 9am, we then drove to Trona, hiked around at Trona Pinnacles, and completed the rest of the drive home after a late lunch in Ridgecrest, CA. We drove nearly 500 miles today in addition to the few hours we spent hiking.

Here are Five Things in retrospect about the trip:

1) Lots of driving. I knew at the outset we'd tally a lot of miles going back and forth between staying at a hotel in Barstow and driving out to the desert every day for hiking, but I hadn't thought hard about what it'd total up to. The answer is 1,784 miles. In 6 days.

2) Better driving than flying this week. Driving such long distances is tiring, even though I do handle it better than most people. "Why not fly so you can just sit back and relax?" some ask. This past week... Ha! Commercial aviation has been a trainwreck. Weather woes are tying up more than half the country, and the airline I fly most often, Southwest, has suffered an operation meltdown. They canceled 15,000 flights around Christmas, leaving hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded.

3) Last-minute buys at REI were useful. I was frustrated on Friday morning as we were packing to leave home that I would need to buy a couple of things: another pair of long-leg hiking pants (I had only one set) and a good flashlight (mine was dead with the battery compartment jammed shut). I was even more frustrated when lines at our local REI store moved so slowly. Oh, and the items were expensive: $80 for the pants, $25 for the flashlight, plus tax. Batteries were included, at least. Fortunately both turned out to be good buys. I needed the second pair of hiking trousers, and they worked better than their seemingly cheap material suggested. (Maybe the material only feels thin. I'll know their durability after another few months.) And the flashlight worked well in exploring caves.

4) We overpacked a little— but the preparation was good. In these trip retrospectives I always consider how close to optimal our packing was. Failing to bring things we need is a mistake, of course, but so is way overpacking. It takes up space and slows a traveler down. This trip I packed a few shirts and a pair of trousers I didn't need. They were street clothes. I packed them because I thought we might do non-hike-y stuff, but it turns out all we did was hiking, driving to & from hiking, getting meals after hiking when we didn't care about being dusty, and resting in the privacy of our hotel room. We also packed a bag of games we didn't play. Those were primarily a rainy day strategy (literally!). We thankfully didn't have too much in the way of rainy days to deal with; just a half day or so.

5) Unplugging from work. It's not really a vacation if you're still thinking about work... or worse, if you're still checking in on things/logging in to help out because you really can't unplug from the job. I succeeded in this regard. I not only stayed unplugged from work the whole time, I forgot about it. Seriously, I don't remember what I need to do first when I go back. That'll be my first order of business next Tuesday morning. 🤣 But between us we're 1-1 in this regard. While I unplugged from work on this trip, Hawk put in almost a full day worth of work spread across Mon-Wed this week.