Pine Valley Expedition

This weekend (meaning Monday and Tuesday for us) Jacqueline and I went camping in the Pine Valley Wilderness. We had a nice site being in the middle of the week. We spent most of the evening playing Klabberjass, pronounced Klobberyosh, since that is our new favorite game to play. As you can see, it was a resounding victory for Pete. We also went for a walk through the campground area to see the sunset. On our walk, we found a trail to hike the next day. We slept great, finally having a cool night's sleep for once. We got going rather early and headed off on this trail. I had no maps and not really any idea where it would lead us, so when the trail just died out by the creek, we had no idea what to think of that. Wanting to make it a longer day than just an hour or two, we decided to keep going. I thought that eventually the trail may pick back up since the creek seemed like a logical place to put a trail. The bushwacking got more extreme, though, but being intrepid explorers, we pressed on. I was able to reassure Jacqueline that we were going the right way when we found a random cairn in the middle of the woods. We got sick of getting scraped up by the brush after a bit, so we decided to head up the ridge. After a strenuous climb, we ended up on another ridge, heading toward the top of a steep mountain. Wisely, we decided that this was not the day to ascend this mountain. Instead, we headed down to the canyon below. It was a great find. We headed down the canyon and it began to narrow. We were cliffed out on a few occasions, causing for some perilous scrambles around to get back into the canyon. But we got to see some beautiful scenery.
The canyon continued to stay narrow and the cliffs suddenly became steeper also. We got to a point where I had to have Jacqueline stay behind up above a place I shimmied down in case we needed to back out. I checked it out and told her it was okay, but I did not see that around the corner, there was only one way to around an obstacle.
The crack that you see coming out of the rock face had to be walked from the jutting out rock over to about where I took this picture. Neither of us liked it too much, but we got it done and at the end of it, I got to enjoy my first dip of the day.
From there on out, the only thing that made us nervous was the giant thunderheads building in the distance. We made it out our little side canyon and back to the creek that led us to our vehicle and safety. I would love to come back with some webbing and ropes and descend this canyon the easy way rather than trying to get around the obstacles.