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| Boy Scout Trail to Wonderland of Rocks, CA | |
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| | Boy Scout Trail to Wonderland of Rocks, CA | | | |
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Boy Scout Trail to Wonderland of Rocks, CA
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| Hiking | 8.38 Miles |
499 AEG |
| | Hiking | 8.38 Miles | 5 Hrs 1 Min | | 2.46 mph |
| 499 ft AEG | 1 Hour 37 Mns Break | | | |
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| partners | | On our second day in Joshua Tree, we planned to hike into (and hopefully through) Wonderland of Rocks and see how close we could get to Rattlesnake Canyon Trailhead on the north side. We'd both hiked part of this route before but had never tried going very far beyond Willow Hole. We started at Boy Scout Trailhead on a breezy, cold morning...despite the 36° temperature when we started, there were already quite a few cars in the parking lot, with a lot of people apparently spending their Thanksgiving morning hiking.
It's a flat, easy hike of ~1.2 miles to Willow Hole Trail, with a few spurs leading off Boy Scout to various rock climbing routes. We veered right toward Willow Hole, and the easy hiking continues but becomes a bit sandier, and the route gets more scenic as it leads into Wonderland of Rocks. The sign at Willow Hole warns that there is no maintained trail beyond that point. We continued past Willow Hole and picked up a faint path as we looked for a route through, but it dead-ended pretty quickly, above a large jumble of boulders below.
We backtracked and picked up another trail just north of that, which provided a better route. We had some fun bouldering as we made our way east, then the wash turned north and led into an area with some pools of water and more greenery mixed in among large boulders. We scrambled through that area, and the dried algae in the wash was interesting, with an almost fabric-like texture.
The wash curved to the east again and got a lot rougher from there, with another spread of huge, jumbled boulders clogging the route. We made our way down to the left around a dry fall with some stagnant pools at the bottom and navigated a series of obstacles, going over and crawling under gaps between the rocks. It was a beautiful area with the rocks and cliffs, and Peak 4315 was above us to the east.
The scrambling was getting more challenging and slowing us down, and we ended up making that our turnaround spot--at the pace we were going, getting to Rattlesnake Canyon and back out wasn't going to happen in any reasonable amount of time, and we had plans for more hiking in the afternoon. We were a little to the southwest of the Valley of Kings rock climbing area when we turned around.
[ youtube video ]
We took a quick food break just before Willow Hole and guessed that we'd start seeing other hikers soon--we hadn't seen anyone up that point. Sure enough, as soon as we got going, it was a steady stream of people hiking in the rest of the way back to the trailhead, with a full parking lot. The stretch on Boy Scout and the early part of Willow Hole Trail was pleasant but not particularly scenic, but getting deeper into the Wonderland of Rocks was fantastic, with a lot of fun scrambling opportunities. |
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