Not every trip needs to be an epic. Sometimes it's a Friday afternoon, the rigs are loaded, and the only plan is to get out there and see what happens. This was one of those. A quick Friday-through-Saturday run into the El Paso Mountains with myself and Lucy the Dog in the Blue Yota, and Brent and Ben Barnes in the red ZJ. The details are fuzzy now, but a few highlights stuck.
Early on, we crossed paths with a race team out doing test runs. It was cool getting a close look at a fully built-out side by side. The driver was Justin Lambert of Cognito Motorsports. A fun reminder that these desert trails serve a lot of different purposes for a lot of different people.
And then there's the rocker panel incident. Going through a narrow canyon, I picked the wrong line on a tricky boulder and crunched my driver-side rocker panel. The real kicker? I had rock sliders on order. They were one week away from being delivered. One week. I was bummed for about an hour, but eventually made peace with the fact that this kind of thing is simply part of the experience. The sliders went on the following week and you can barely tell it happened. I don't give it any thought nowadays.
It was a hot weekend, so finding a camp spot with some shade felt like winning the lottery. We set up, ate, and called it a night early.
The next morning we hit the trail again and made our way to the highlight of the trip: the Burro Schmidt Tunnel.
The story of "Burro" Schmidt is one of those desert legends that sounds made up. While mining gold in the El Paso Mountains, Schmidt got fed up with the dangerous ridge between his claims and the smelter in Mojave. Rather than keep hauling ore over the ridge with his two burros, he decided to go through the mountain. He started digging in 1900. The tunnel was about 6 feet tall and 10 feet wide, cut through solid granite. He was trapped by falling rock multiple times and injured often. In 1920, a road was completed from Last Chance Canyon to Mojave, making the tunnel completely unnecessary. Schmidt kept digging anyway. As the Wikipedia article puts it, he "claimed to be obsessed with completion and dug on."
We walked all the way through the tunnel and confirmed that Schmidt was indeed a very determined man.
Nearby, there's a free-use cabin on BLM land. I can't recall much about it now, but it's another one of those first come, first served setups. We were still early in our exploring so we passed on it and kept moving.
A short trip, but a good one. Not every adventure needs three days and a master plan. Sometimes you just need a canyon, a campfire, and a tunnel dug by a man too stubborn to quit. We haven't been back since, but Lucy would probably vote to change that.