My buddy Mac and I celebrated my 75th birthday by doing a hike at Hamblin Mountain near Lake Mead.
The area we hiked is just off of Hwy 169 (Northshore Road), about 50 miles south of Mesquite. It is a fairly desolate area with views of what is left of Echo Bay, a northerly finger of Lake Mead. The bay still has water in it, but the lake level is down 100’ or so from year’s past. It’s a sad and scary sight to see, given how thirsty the Southwest is getting.
Lots of rugged peaks out in this area.
We started our hike at Cottonwood Wash armed with a printed, crude map of the area, some hike instructions and GPS coordinates of Hamblin Mountain peak. There are no defined trails out in the wilderness, so we headed out the desert like the pioneers, feeling our way along. The info that we were using came from some guy on the Internet who did a 10-mile loop hike but, unfortunately, didn’t put any rock cairns in place to coach future hikers.
There was a lot of interesting landscape and geology going on as we wandered up a number of washes toward what we thought was Hamblin Mountain.
We thought we could figure out the guy’s loop route but kept running into dead ends or sheer escarpments that we were leery of tackling. We thought we had figured it out at one point, only to walk about a half-mile to a dead-end point.
We finally threw in the towel and walked the 3-1/2 miles back to the car, swearing all the way that we would be back after doing some research on All Trails, Google Earth, and other hiking route sources.
On the way back up Hwy 169, we stopped at a little roadside picnic area called Desert Springs. It is out in the middle of nowhere, up against a tall, rocky, and desolate mountain. At the bottom of the escarpment there is a spring and a little pond that is evidently the water source for native wildlife in the area, like wild burros, horses, coyotes, and the like.
The volume of water oozing out of the rock is amazing… 400 gallons per minute, according to a sign near the pond. A huge old Palm tree sits right adjacent to the pond, sopping up its share of the precious water.
This and other sights out in these remote areas remind us that there is a lot of beauty and interesting stuff out in the “boring” desert. Of course, we didn’t see any living things on our hike, although we did notice several wild turkeys near the springs.
Mac had brought along his portable grill, so we had a nice hot dog lunch at the mini oasis.
It was a beautiful day in the desert, but unsatisfying, as we fail to summit Hamblin Mountain.
Update: Mac, Lloyd, and I are going to re-try the hike in a week using better maps and instructions.