Neal Johns - 12-9-2006 at 03:09 AM
Dec. 30-31
Headed south toward Mission/Canyon Calamujue. The road was in great shape, almost like it was when new! Gassed up again in Gonzaga (never pass by a
gas station in Baja). Stopped at Las Arrastras for lunch and then took the lesser road from there east, which is the route of the El Camino Real. The
Mission ruins consist of melted adobe walls, which were the hapel and the storehouses, and fallen rock walls that were the Indian quarters. The nearby
artesian spring and the resultant white tufa formation had the most flow I had seen. The water from springs flows in the road for more than a mile but
never fear, the mud has a bottom. After reaching Hwy. 1, we headed north to gas up in Catavina from five-gallon cans at $3 a gallon, and camp in our
hidden palm oasis with a trickling stream through it. We went to sleep with a frog serenade.
Got rolling this morning and headed for a pictograph site we had not been to. After going north on the Hwy. to El Progreso, we headed south on dirt
for twenty miles or so and following some old, out-of-date directions, finally found Tinaja del Palo Verde. In a small arroyo, there is a natural tank
in the bedrock, which was dry even though a small concrete dam has improved the tank. On the rock walls there were abstract painting hundreds of years
old. Nearby, on the banks of the arroyo, discarded seashells from long ago feasts littered the ground. True to its name, Palo Verde trees shaded us as
we ate lunch. This is in one of the most isolated places we had found rockart. Getting lost is half the fun of Baja travel and lost we were. The
directions to the next rockart site were impossible to follow correctly, so we went on some "interesting" roads. Tipping over 30 degrees in a pickup
with a pop-top camper on it should qualify you for the Adventurers’ Club. Giving it up, we returned in the dark to Arroyo San Fernando to camp in the
nice sand wash a mile from Mission San Fernando. We had an uneventful New Years Eve.