Rainbow
Basin Trip, March 2000
Scenic Drive
Rainbow Basin Scenic Drive
Saturday morning after our instant hot cereal breakfast, we drove out past the group campground and along Fossil Bed Road to the "scenic drive". There were signs everywhere about the California Desert Tortoise, which are apparently very easy to mistake for speed bumps on the dirt roads, but we never encountered one.
The drive is a dirt road, mostly graded but with some rough spots which made us cross our fingers that my little Sentra would make it through OK. It winds through some beautiful sedimentary layers, and is one-way due to the narrowness and curves in the road. I would advise against driving this road if there had been recent rain; mud from the sedimentary mudstones and conglomerates which form some layers of the canyon would have made it treacherous for all but the most agile 4-wheel drive vehicles.
Dad liked this green layer that tends to weather into rounded boulders; he's walking along the layer and perched up near the top of this promontory in the photos below right:
Near the end of the drive is a parking area and plenty of wandering-around-room, which Dad was viewing from his perch. Somewhere in these photos are some other people wandering around in the upper right, if you've got very sharp eyes.
Once we got to the parking area, we also wandered around for a while. There were some families around the parking area (a pair of teenaged boys were perched on boulders listening to their walkmans and looking very bored; they were deaf to the thundering whisper of the beauty and mystery which surrounded them)... but as we ventured further away from the cars, we quickly became the only people we could see or hear.
Dad tends to quest for the high promontories, I tend to explore canyons. There were layers of grey, green, rusty brown, ruddy red, dark brown, nearly black... some layers were mudstone, others more coherent sandstone, still others conglomerate with interestingly colored cobbles. The sound of the wind calls to your soul in places like this.
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