High Desert Flier: Trip to the Alvord and Three Forks

Friday, July 13, 2018

Trip to the Alvord and Three Forks

Last week on Connie's days off, we decided to make the back country trip to the Alvord Desert via coyote Lake.

We loaded up water and dogs into the truck and set off via the back way, first to Coyote Lake. It of course is pretty dusty and about 56 miles across the desert. The Lake is huge and quite impressive. Our next stop was at a series of rock ledges that contains some of the largest "flag stones" that I have seen on this Desert.We then bumped our way to the Alvord.

Our first view of the Alvord

A shot to the S.W.

A shot to the N.E.

We drove across the lake bed to a friends camp by the Hot springs. He had been flying a Drifter EAB, and had his air cleaner come off in flight, destroying his prop. He had called the night before in hopes that I had another prop that he could use. We stopped to visit and check on him.

After a short visit, we headed on to Fields where we bought two shakes, one hamburger and an order of Fries, for the paltry price of a bit more than $30.00.

We then headed to Micky Basin to show Connie the Hot springs there.

A view of some of the springs coming off the Mountain.

While Micky Springs is fairly unimpressive at first view, it gets much more interesting after viewing the mud pots, boiling springs and steam vents. I didn't take a single picture. Sorry!

Our next stop was the Playa of Micky Basin. There is a cinder cone on the East side of the Playa that only juts up some hundred or more feet. At the top there was a "fire Pit" constructed of chunks of Cinder found on the cone. Inside was an "ammo Can" with a bunch of notebooks with passages written to what I decided was an Marine vet, whose PTSD had gotten the better of him. Most of the testament themes concerned the fact that the perpetrator of his suicide had no idea of how much people cared and missed him. A sad reminder that we should never keep our feelings of love and appreciation to ourselves.

It was a bit of a long day, but well worth the effort and the dust that it entailed. For whatever reason I took very few pictures, of a rather remarkable trip through the Desert. I seem to be so busy being a guide to Connie's exploration of this end of the desert that I forget to document the trips.

Three forks

I have been wanting to make a trip around the Three Forks road, off Hwy 95 to Three Forks and then back around the other side to Jordan Valley. For whatever reason, Connie and I have put it off several times in favor of other excursions that seemed to offer better options. Today it was on the top of the list.

After looking at the tires on the truck, I decided that we would take the Subaru on this one. I also decided to leave the pups at home. You should have seen the disappointed faces when I told them to go in the house. The reports of many Rattle Snakes in that area as well as a planned visit to Rattle Snake Cave was the reason for my decision.

Rattle Snake Cave is a Lava tube that opened up on top of a little ridge at the turn off to Danner. Of course the name given to it is very optimistic, as I have been there many times and have yet to see anything more dangerous than a lizard.

Connie actually wants a Rattle Snake skin, so we would have been happy to find one, but of course there was none present. It was hotter than the proverbial "hubs of hell", so if there was any, they were hiding in some place a bit cooler.

We did find a lot of Pigeons and one Barn Own that was living in the tubes. The tube only goes about 200 feet, before a cave in blocks it off. It was nice and cool there however.

The road to Three forks is well graded and very nice. We saw nothing but lots of Cows on the way out. Even with the number of Cows we saw, the grass and fuel load is pretty high. Hopefully the heat lightening will miss that area in the coming month or so.