We were camped north of Baker, Ca at what I think was the remains of ghost town Silver Lake. I bit of research showed the town existed from about 1906 till 1940 …
It turned out to be a pretty decent place to camp. In close to a week, vehicles only came by once, though some ATV’s were on the nearby powerline road, mostly on weekends. There is lots of potential firewood laying around, though we never had a fire because of the constant winds, and the possibility of a California fire restriction.
The only real downside was the amount of broken glass all around. I cleaned up some of the worst stuff close to camp, but there was plenty to go around, no doubt courtesy of small minded ‘target’ shooters.
Industrial traffic across the road on the dry lake bed.
I went for a look at the nearby Silver Lake cemetery. I thought all the graves would be from the early 1900’s or so, but there were quite a number of fairly recent graves, including WWII military vets, and some into the 2000’s.
The most prominent grave there is the one for ‘Death Valley Jack’, Harry W Nickerson, who was an early homesteader and pioneer, apparently responsible for improving a lot of the area roads. He was born in 1887, and died in 1932, aged 45.
“Nickerson was an early Mojave pioneer. He homesteaded at Halloran Summit and established a tourist stop that would soon be called Yucca Grove. It consisted of several stucco cabins, a cafe, and a garage”
Here’s a video I found, telling more about Death Valley Jack. https://youtu.be/Ljbe4TgeVwc
It was still fairly cool at the relatively high elevation at Baker, so we decided to look for some more lower elevation warmth. But first we took a detour down Cima road into the Mojave National Preserve to look at a place we had camped previously. But it was even higher and with the brisk wind, it was even colder, so we didn’t linger. We carried on through Nipton, Ca, and Searchlight Nevada, and down into Lake Mead National Recreation Area. Entry gates were closed (maybe because it was Monday?), and we found our way down about 6 miles of gravel wash to Six Mile Cove!
This road can be horrible with washboard, but this time it seemed to be in much better condition thankfully.
We met one rig headed out, and the second and last departed not long after our arrival, so we had the whole place to ourselves for at least the night!
To the casual observer, the trash situation here is much better than when we first visited years ago. And at least the huge dumpsters have covers on them now! But in spite of the improvements, I have been able to fill my 5 gallon pail many times with thousands of bottle caps and almost everything else. Venturing back into the bush produces a ‘gold mine’ of bottles, cans, paper plates, chip bags, and despite the three regularly cleaned outhouses, a disgusting array of TP.
Just a couple of pails of trash, from the many I hauled to the dumpster.
It is very quiet here at this time of year, and the huge dumpsters are virtually empty, but nonetheless, the big truck showed up to remove the almost empty bin with a completely empty one …
As you may have guessed, since I am not blogging from my yacht in Monaco … I did not win the $2B Powerball lottery recently! I was close though – I had six numbers. Problem is – none of them matched the winning ones! Another $2. down the drain!
Another test of a video – this time from Dropbox.
A major battle happening in our camp spot!
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