8 miles of hiking • 1500' elevation gain •
Please excuse me as I add hikes from my spring break vacation.
Decided on a weirdo tour of Southern California deserts for spring break. Sadly, a large part of Death Valley National Park was shut down due to flash flooding from rains the week prior. We made the best of what we could see.
Our first night into town we camped in Stovepipe Wells, and as I had marked Mosaic Canyon as a point of interest, off we headed. The road to the trailhead was closed for construction, so we embarked cross country to skip the road, adding an extra 1000 ft of gain and 5 miles to the trip.
With warning signs at the trailhead to not hike past 10:00 am we considered the heat, and decided it safe to continue on since we had spring temps. It was still hot and exposed, but not the deadly summer temps that hit Death Valley. The canyon ended up being pretty fun, we hit dryfall #1 and easily passed it. Dryfall #2 we started to climb the overland path marked by cairns, but decided we were getting too hot and wanted retreat into shade and food. If we would have continued to #3, we would have needed climbing gear. We ended up having fun scrambling the route we did, and retreated back to the trailhead.
