Last night was indeed much nicer than Monday night; very quiet and calm air after the storm blew through. We slept well. Even the cat was much more relaxed. The mountains were covered with a light snow dusting all around, and the day was bright and clear. Beautiful.


This morning we walked around the campground, Mesquite Springs, locating the spring and looking for petroglyphs. Apparently The best way to locate springs in the desert is to look for salt deposits on the surface. We found lots of salt. :-) We had several references to the petroglyphs, but nothing that told us how to find them, and all of the rangers professed ignorance. We talked to the campground host when he came around, and he said that there had been so much damage to the petroglyphs by vandals that the park service decided that they would no longer tell the public where to find them. We never did find them, though we saw a rabbit and what was probably a roadrunner.


We drove south, finding a few places on the road where last night’s rain had washed mud and rocks across the road. we took an unmarked road off to the side and visited the original stovepipe well. It was named because they stuck an old stovepipe in it to mark its location. It’s right next to a range of sand dunes. As we drove up we saw big towers of dust over the dunes. It was probably dust devils, but they were too far away to tell for sure. We did see some smaller ones closer in. The actual town of Stovepipe Wells was an unimpressive tourist trap.



Mosaic canyon was at the end of a long washboard road that went straight up an alluvial fan. The top of the road gave a lovely view of the middle portion of the valley, and the canyon was an interesting combination of water-sculpted marble and conglomerate, hence, “mosaic”. I hope you can get an impression from these pictures. The conglomerate really does look like some mosaics I’ve seen.


We went back up to Mesquite Springs for another night. I really like the north part of the valley, and the campground is the nicest we’ve found. The scenery is in some ways more subtle than that further south, but it’s satisfying to me. I could happily live here if it had an internet connection :-)