Mother Earth’s Pumpkin Patch in Anza-Borrego, California

As Halloween nears we thought it would be nice to include Mother Earth’s decorations for the festivities.  That can be found at The Pumpkin Patch in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in Southern California.  Yes, here you can find nature’s finest pumpkins set in stone for all to enjoy throughout the year.

Just like in the popular Charlie Brown Halloween classic featuring the great pumpkin that can be elusive to find, so is The Pumpkin Patch, which is literally in the middle of nowhere.  Luckily we found it on our first try and were thrilled with the discovery.  The Pumpkin Patch may not be much to look at for some, but to us, it was wonderful.

The Pumpkin Patch is an isolated area full of concretions.  These naturally occurring concretions are actually cemented sand particles which are found in the Colorado Desert and in southeastern California, hence the ones in Anza-Borrego.  A concretion is a compact mass of mineral matter that embeds on a host rock of a different composition, or a shell, leaf, fossil or insect.  This cementing action along with the result of wind and water naturally take on a spherical, disk-shape described fancifully as cannonballs, pumpkins, or dinosaur eggs.

The Pumpkin Patch has some of the most impressive naturally forming pumpkin rocks you will ever see.  They are all sizes along a bedding plane perched randomly over a small mud bank.  Some are a foot in diameter.  Some look like small pebbles which will eventually become big pumpkins in geologic time.  Concretions have been documented since the 18^th century with intriguing descriptions to explain the imaginative shapes of fascinating geologic curiosities, human artifacts and even extra-terrestrial debris.  The fact that concretions appear most in Diablo sandstone only adds to the mystery.  The Pumpkin Patch can be found in an area located within the Ocotillo Wells off-highway vehicle section, in the upper reaches of Arroyo Tapiado (meaning concretion wash in Spanish).  To see the Pumpkin Patch you will need an off-road vehicle as the terrain is sandy soft mud and very difficult to navigate.  Pay close attention to the random signs on the dirt roads or you can easily miss the turnoff.

If you don’t have a 4×4 vehicle to see the rock pumpkins but still want to do something fun and different for the Halloween season you should still go to Anza-Borrego Desert State Park.  One of our favorite stops every time we’re in the park is to visit the historic Butterfield Stage.  The state has restored the building and now it is one of the most famous of the Butterfield Stage’s way stations developed during the mid 19^th century when immigrants rushed to California during the gold rush.

On one of our trips a local shared a legendary ghost story pertaining to the Butterfield Stage station.  During the gold rush era a prospector asked his fiancé to join him at the Butterfield.  He had amassed enough to have his future bride come out and live in California with him.  She pioneered her way out west in covered wagon along the ruts in the trail and settled into the Butterfield.  Per her future husbands’ request, she brought with her a beautiful white gown to get married in.  She waited every night at the station for her groom to be wearing her white gown so they could get married as soon as they reunited.  Her wait turned into days, weeks, months, until she eventually became despondent.  After six months he never showed up and she hung herself wearing the white dress.  Ghost stories soon emerged about the lady in the white dress who would walk from the front to the back room on the right of the Butterfield Stage where she hung herself and then disappear.  Legend has it that she can be seen most on Christmas Eve when she died.

With nearly 500,000 acres Anza-Borrego is the nation’s second largest state park.  It is a low desert with its lowest part 100 feet below sea level, rising 6,000 feet at the high point in the San Ysidro Mountains.  The start park gets its name from explorer Juan Bautista DeAnza who pioneered a route through the vast rugged wilderness to Alta California from Mexico in 1774.  The park has 600 miles of mostly unpaved roads.   There is a lot to see in Anza, including mud caves.  But since we’re into the holiday season, we wanted to be in the spirit of Halloween and share Mother Nature’s very own Pumpkin Patch and a ghost story.  Won’t you join us on our tour of Anza-Borrego State Park, including the famed mud caves, pioneer ruts, Butterfield Stage, and The Pumpkin Patch?  We show you all in our photographic tour, minus the ghost.

Let’s go!

Mineral King, California

Mineral King is located just below Sequoia National Park in California.  The surrounding peaks and valley of Mineral King equal 12,600 acres of a beautiful glacial canyon spectacularly tucked within the incredible mountain peaks of the Great Western Divide.  The views are so majestic visitors often feel as if they are in another country, such as the French Alps.  The open beauty of the glacial canyon is wildly rugged and not easy to get to.  The road in is long, steep and slow going (RVs are not recommended); evident that nature is king here and not man.  The road access closes from November 1 and reopens in late May.  Backcountry permits are needed to explore the area.

Mineral King is best visited as a backpacking trip.  Just as the road in is long and grueling, so is the hike in, with major altitude gain that makes it a heavy breathing trip for all inclined.  This is a land of fresh air that one must work to breathe in.  This is also a haven for marmots famed for leaving their marks on unsuspecting parked cars.  Visitors are asked to check into their car hoods before driving off, as marmots are known to hide there and worse, eat radiator hoses and chew on electrical wires.

The valley gained prominence in the early 1870’s when silver was discovered.  By 1873 miners flocked to the area.  The Mineral King Road was built by a mining company in 1879 which open up access for future tourism to the present.  The mines never produced so the mining company opened the area up to logging, hydro-electric development, building, and tourism.  The area then became a designated game refuge within the national forest.  For more than 20 years Mineral King was in a bitter dispute to develop the valley into a ski resort.  By 1978 the valley and surrounding peaks were transferred from the national forest to Sequoia National Park by an act of Congress, forever protecting this stunning landscape.

Whenever we are in Mineral King we are there to cave.  It’s one of the few alpine caving areas remotely close to Los Angeles.  Just as impressive as the glacially sculpted valley of marble, schist and granite rocks are the snow capped mountains and delightful wild flowers including columbines, one of our favorites.   This area offers one of the most scenic backpacks to fun little caves worth the hike.  As you can see from our slideshow the caves are very smooth white marble that has been solutioned out from the melted glaciers.

We explored all the caves in the area and a seasonal one like the glacier cave carved out of a melting snow bank.  It made for very pretty pictures as you can see.  The next day we climbed the mountains and enjoyed the blue hues of a glacier lake high up.  Once you see the photos you will understand why we keep coming back for more alpine caving.  It literally takes our breath away.

Let’s go!

A Cave in Kings Canyon National Park, California

Church Cave is like a second home to Don and me.  It was the first wild cave we found together as a couple (he knew where to look).  We did this cave on our honeymoon and landed jobs as cave naturalists.   Two weeks after our wedding we were working at the commercial cave Boyden Cavern in Kings Canyon National Park in California.

After working all day giving cave tours in Boyden, we would play at night in the adjacent wild caves.  That went on for the full season, five months straight.  Church cave became our favorite pastime activity and we got to know the cave very well.

The cave has several entrances and miles of passages, so we never became bored.  It was a different caving trip every night.  Sometimes we crawled in one entrance and walked out another dripping wet from a waterfall climb.  Other times we could be adventurous and rappel down a 300 foot drop to exit an hour and a half later, one of the faster routes in the cave.  There was also the Circuit route which has a series of meandering “s” turns in a tight canyon with multiple climbs, chimneying and crawls; this is by far the longest and most strenuous of all the routes in the cave.

Church Cave has many scenic rope drops as you can see from our photos.   We know the cave so well we could do it in our sleep and have led many trips from novices to veteran cavers.  But what endears us most to Church Cave is the new cave entrance discovery Don made that summer we worked at Boyden.  He found a blowing hole when we were searching for caves in our teens.  That’s why we went back on our honeymoon and lucked out with the cave naturalist jobs.  That enabled Don to dig out the new entrance which became known as “Donald’s Duck” for the duck under you must do to get in.  The new cave discovery had multiple rope drops.  We kept running out of rope on our first trips, which was very exciting.  The new cave passages led right into Church Cave, not to Don’s surprise, as it was in the same gulch.  At that time Church Cave was one of the premiere wild caves in California, so the news spread quickly among cavers.

Discovering a new entrance to a popular cave comes an element of responsibility and conservation.  To protect the cave, Don and I organized a “Cave Gating Project” for the National Forest Service before it became part of the Park Service and got other National Speleological Society (NSS) cavers, throughout California to volunteer.  But that is another story in itself and we’ll save that one for a future blog entry.

Church Cave was discovered in the late 1800’s by Denver S. Church and Put Boyden.  That was way before the convicts built the road down into the Kings Canyon from Sequoia National Park.  The cave was later explored by an expedition from the City of Fresno.  In the 1950s it was further explored by cavers of the NSS and mapped by Ellis Hedlund in the early 1960s.  We have one of Ellis cave maps as we were lucky to know him and bought one off of him years before he passed away.  Church Cave is so complex the cave map passages resemble a plate of spaghetti.  That and the fact that it’s a climbers cave is what makes the cave so special.

I noticed early on in our Church cave trips that the cave has unusual acoustics.  It always sounded like people talking.  When I mentioned the sounds, I was informed that it must be the water in the cave.  Church has many stream tributaries and even waterfalls during early spring trips and especially in El Nino seasons of heavy rainfall.  We have seen this for ourselves and even had to wear wetsuits during these times as the cave literally floods and you must swim in places that were normally dry.

Living in Kings Canyon when we worked at Boyden I became interested in the history.  We were lucky to gain access to the park service library.  We found out there was a death in Church Cave.  In the 1970s some locals from Fresno went into Church Cave for a photography trip.  While lowering the gear down the 140 foot entrance drop, one of the men accidentally slipped to his death.

Ellis knew about it, as he was a local and told us about it when asked.  We also talked about it with some of the Southern California Grotto cavers (the local chapter of the National Speleological Society).  One told us about a wallet he once found stashed near one of the cave entrances.  It was a few years after the fatal caving accident and he didn’t know the wallet belonged to the deceased.  That is the only major incident we know about the cave.

The biggest danger we encountered was the bobcat above us that looked like it wanted to jump down on us while we were in the cave gulch at night en route to Church Cave.  Oh, and the time a bat kept flying into Don as he was securing the rope at the entrance for our 300 foot rappel.  Or the time I almost stepped on a baby timber rattlesnake in the gulch.  But that’s why it’s called rattlesnake gulch.  Plus there’s the nasty poison oak that necessitated a midnight drive to the hospital after Don dug out the entrance.

What makes Church so dear to our hearts is it was our very first rappel.  We did the 160 foot drop in the Cathedral Room the first time we did the cave.  That got us hooked for good.

Let’s go!

Mount Rushmore and a cave in South Dakota

The United States colossal statues of Presidents’ Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt at Mount Rushmore National Memorial attracts three million visitors a year.  They come from all around the world to see the famed American symbol of freedom tucked in the Black Hills of South Dakota.  The beautiful monument also signifies the birth, growth, development and preservation of our nation over the century.  But most importantly, Mount Rushmore National Memorial provides visitors with a gift of understanding and love for our country’s history and cultures and the importance of caring for that legacy.

George Washington, the first president, who led the early colonists in the American Revolutionary War to win independence from Great Britain, is the more prominent.  Thomas Jefferson, the third president, authored the Declaration of Independence.  Theodore Roosevelt, the 26^th president’s leadership provided rapid economic growth and negotiated the construction of the Panama Canal, and was known for ending large corporate monopolies to ensure rights of the working man.  Abraham Lincoln, the 16^th president, abolished slavery, and held the nation together during the Civil War.

Mount Rushmore is actually named after New York City Attorney Charles E. Rushmore, who in 1884 checked the legal titles on the property and the mountain.  A local in Pine Camp named Bill Challis told the attorney that the mountain never had a name but that it would be called Rushmore from that day on, and it was.  The sculpture was created by Gutzon Borglum and 400 workers.  It took 14 years (from October 4, 1927 to October 31, 1941) to complete at a cost of nearly one million dollars.

Since childhood, both Don and I have wanted to witness the magnificence of standing among the Presidents of Mount Rushmore.  The presidents’ heads stand six stories high.  The fact that this was a man-made labor of love in sheer cliff was enough of a draw; visiting the monument is like walking into a history book.  Of course as always, we were there for more than a history lesson.  We were in South Dakota for an annual National Speleological Society caving convention.  And as on every trip we ever made, we always ended up underground, our main mission for leaving home.

During the convention we did the usual caving trips.  Highlighted here in our slide show is Reed Cave that was found in a rock quarry.  It has one of the more unusual cave entrances (and as you can see from our Website, there are many unusual ones).  To enter Reed Cave one must poke their body downward into a culvert that was put in to secure the opening.  But that’s always been the draw of caving, you never know what body contortions you will do next, for the love of exploration.  Reed Cave didn’t disappoint and we took lots of photos to share with you.  We also included a few during the set up of the convention for historical purposes, and the rodeo during.  As you can see, cavers do sometimes come up for air on the surface.

Let’s go!