The Coffee Walk That Became a Culvert Operation

We usually take our coffee for a walk in the mornings.  Today, after a walk around The Steps with our friend Dee, we set out to explore the wash near our RV.  Down a steep ATV track we walked, into the wash.

Last year, we explored up the wash on one of our coffee walks.  This time, we headed downstream.  It wasn't long before we spotted a culvert under the nearby highway:

As we neared, we decided we needed to "collect" this culvert because it differs from all the others we've found.  Two years ago, our wash hike encountered five perfectly round culverts spanning the wash.  Yesterday, we found a single square culvert.  Today it's an oval one!

Beyond the culvert, this wash is narrow and rocky, strewn with larger boulders, but with enough open sandy bottom to permit us to walk easily.  However, Kathy couldn't resist stopping to look at the spectacular conglomerate boulders strewn about one section:

About 1.5 miles down the wash, we encountered the expected pourover which stopped our progress:

Throughout this area, as the washes descend through geological layers, they all eventually encounter an older layer of much harder rock.  This layer doesn't erode nearly as fast as the sandstone or alluvial fan conglomerates, so the water has to spill over.  The rushing waterfall eventually carves a rounded opening through which it gushes, and a small pool where it hits softer rock again -- but in the transition the hard rocks creates a vertical cliff.  Some are not so high and we can navigate them without special gear.  Others are too tall, steep and slick to be conquered by hikers such as we.

This was a convenient place to turn around, since this was only a coffee walk and not a longer hike.  On the way back, we looked for the unusual details we missed as we walked down the wash -- things such as these delicate white flowers pushing up through the otherwise undisturbed cryptobiotic crust in a part of the wash that is not often disturbed by rushing water --

-- or this lone dead tree on the cliff above us:

Despite the absence of other human footprints (or even animal tracks or scat) in this wash, we did regularly encounter informal cairns which generally seemed to mark routes through the wash.  Here, Kathy poses with one of them:

Kathy found this beautiful blue-and-red striated boulder and instructed David to take this photo for our English friends, Jane and Kim.  Sorry, ladies, but this one was too big to post to you.

We found our culvert to be relatively photogenic this morning, so we end this blog entry with some more portraits: