Hiking Amboy Crater
Dec. 25th, 2022 06:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalker5 Days in the Desert travelog #6
Amboy, CA - Say, 24 Dec 2022, 12:30pm
In my previous blog I wrote about driving to Amboy Crater in the Mojave Desert. ...Well, driving there and then hiking the first mile or so up to its base. From there it was up, up, up to the top.
That's all volcanic rock on the slope. Most of it is pumice so it's surprisingly light when you pick up a piece... but it's also sharp so you don't want to fool around with it too much. Or trip and fall on it.
The trail enters the side of the crater where it's kind of open. From here paths diverge and you can go into the middle or up around either side of the rim. We decided to loop the rim, taking the left branch first.
Climbing to the ridge was more up, up, up. Not a huge elevation change; remember it's only a few hundred feet vertical from the base to the highest point on the rim. But with this Martian landscape distances seem off.
Once atop the ridge it's still beautiful... in a Martian landscape kind of way.
At places the rim is very narrow, barely 2 feet wide with steep— and sharp— dropoffs on both sides.
Here's a panoramic picture from the top that shows the whole crater. Click the link to expand the picture if it's cropped or low-res on your screen.
In the last pic above you can see lower ridges inside the crater. The volcano here has erupted at least 4 times. The concentric ridges are subsequent eruptions. THe most recent was about 10,000 years ago.
After looping the ridge we headed back down the side— carefully!— and then a mile back across the desert plane to the parking area.
On our drive to our next adventure for the day we passed the town of Amboy. Yes, there is a town called Amboy. It's about a mile east of the crater. And it's a proverbial one-horse town. There are a handful of nondescript buildings around a gas station with two pumps... and the gas is an eye-watering $7.85/gallon. For context, that's more than double what we paid in Barstow ($3.79/gallon) last night.
Amboy, CA - Say, 24 Dec 2022, 12:30pm
In my previous blog I wrote about driving to Amboy Crater in the Mojave Desert. ...Well, driving there and then hiking the first mile or so up to its base. From there it was up, up, up to the top.
That's all volcanic rock on the slope. Most of it is pumice so it's surprisingly light when you pick up a piece... but it's also sharp so you don't want to fool around with it too much. Or trip and fall on it.
The trail enters the side of the crater where it's kind of open. From here paths diverge and you can go into the middle or up around either side of the rim. We decided to loop the rim, taking the left branch first.
Climbing to the ridge was more up, up, up. Not a huge elevation change; remember it's only a few hundred feet vertical from the base to the highest point on the rim. But with this Martian landscape distances seem off.
Once atop the ridge it's still beautiful... in a Martian landscape kind of way.
At places the rim is very narrow, barely 2 feet wide with steep— and sharp— dropoffs on both sides.
Here's a panoramic picture from the top that shows the whole crater. Click the link to expand the picture if it's cropped or low-res on your screen.
In the last pic above you can see lower ridges inside the crater. The volcano here has erupted at least 4 times. The concentric ridges are subsequent eruptions. THe most recent was about 10,000 years ago.
After looping the ridge we headed back down the side— carefully!— and then a mile back across the desert plane to the parking area.
On our drive to our next adventure for the day we passed the town of Amboy. Yes, there is a town called Amboy. It's about a mile east of the crater. And it's a proverbial one-horse town. There are a handful of nondescript buildings around a gas station with two pumps... and the gas is an eye-watering $7.85/gallon. For context, that's more than double what we paid in Barstow ($3.79/gallon) last night.
