Echo Canyon
Echo Canyon can be a lot of things. It is a mild trail out to the Eye of the Needle rock formation , and a mild trail still out to the well preserved Inyo Mine Site. Beyond that it turns into a little one hit wonder 4x4 trail with one of the toughest rock obstacles in DV , or so I was told. Beyond that it is an escape route out into the Nevada desert , and our exit route to begin our long road back home. I always wanted to check out Echo Canyon, and I'm glad we were able to .
A few miles in you will find the 'Eye of the Needle'
A few miles further east brings you to the Inyo Mine .
But the trail after these things is what I was interested in . I knew my 'Runner would have no trouble with the bedrock obstacles and pinches in the narrow canyon. But I had been reading and studying up so long on this trail , I had actually gone through about 3 different trucks . It was the classic case of something taking on a life and aura of its own, beyond truth or reality or facts , and that is how I perceived Echo Canyon, as some wicked hard trail that I must see for myself . Like most things of this nature , it turned out to be rather anticlimactic ... Anyway here is the obstacle
Many , MANY , people it looked like had stacked rocks to take the bite out of the staircase obstacle . I had a mind to actually start removing rocks to return it to whatever state it was in before people touched it ... But I did not . Another view
I walked up the obstacle with nary a wheel spin or protest from the truck at all . It was still great fun.
After the first obstacle
The road beyond the two main Echo Canyon obstacles leads up to Echo Pass near the CA/NV border . Here is a shot of that
It is hard to tell from that pic, but just above and right of her head is the outline of the Sierra . I could clearly make out the Whitney group . It was truly a delight to see the Sierra some 100 miles and five mountain ranges away .
The girlfriend drives again as I get my afternoon jog in down canyon , and help spotting her
Our afternoon and last night in DV was upon us . We camped out on a little hill overlooking the Amargosa desert in NV.
It seems fitting to me that our last night ended with a grand view of essentially nothing . We could see miles of barren desert and forgotten mountain ranges to be sure, but nothing that anyone would pay to see , or fly in from Europe for . We were out of DV , and we had the most satisfying view of all . A landscape untouched and unwanted by man , a desert that will always be left alone and hurriedly passed through by a traveler to reach somewhere else. But solitude and separation will always be the commodity that a desert possesses , and we were grateful to share it for a brief moment .
