A week ago I met some of my hiking buddies in Joshua Tree at the Lost Palms Oasis trailhead. This is a popular spot for the Mastodon Trail loop. However, we were planning on going way beyond that to a peak where seldmom anyone goes. Eagle mountain is listed on the Sierra Club's Desert peak list.
First we had to cross 3 miles of open desert and navigated through sandy washes, and did some rock bouldering. The Landscape was beautiful. We passed lots of cool rock formations along the way as we had to ditch unforgiving desert plants such as yucca, cacti and cholla.
After three miles of admring the scenery, we finally arrived at our first steep climb. We had to traverse the rocky ridge to get to our first break spot on some cool rock outcroppings.
After the break we continued on traversing a few more ridges which seemed to get tougher to hike through. It was a bit of a rollercoaster as we descended and ascended a few ridges.
Unfortunately, the group was unable to summit. We had a few issues with people in our group and after eight hours we decided to just head back to our cars.
To add, we still had one more huge hurdle before getting down to the desert floor. We had to descend a 3000 ft ridge and pass a dry fall along the way as we tried to avoid the desert plants on steep, sketchy terrain.
By this point, it was a race for time. The sun was setting and we did our best to get back to our cars before nightfall.
We were unsuccessful and arrived back to our cars by 8:30pm.
I won't get into details but lots of mistakes were made during the course of our trek, even though majority of the group was experienced. We did have some navigation tools but still got off track The group ended up separating. We spent 12.5 hours in the desert that day.
Needless to say, many lessons were learned and I will probably return with a stronger group of hikers and an earlier start time.
