We followed the trail at the base of the mountain for a while longer, marveling at the geology of this area and the view in general.  The trail eventually reached the end of this particular string of mountains with the black rock at the end.  The black rock is actually an ancient volcanic island and is black because of the basalt and limestone.

Next to the black rock are the black rock hot springs.  Unlike double springs, the black rock hot springs are a pleasant temperature and looked amazing! In hindsight, maybe we should have spent the night here? Either way, I should have remembered to bring my swimming suit to the desert!

After the end of these mountains we were supposed to head east across the playa to the town of Sulphur, but due to navigational errors and lack of obvious signage we went around the end and turned north.  We ended up driving for way longer than we should have before realizing that this trail never actually goes east so we had to backtrack for 45 minutes or so before finding the path across the playa.

So the high rock canyon trail was pretty gnarly and I wouldn’t have wanted to cross it in a wagon, but until now it didn’t look like the trail was that hard. The playa is super flat and should be easy to cross, right? Well, foreshadowing aside, it was not. 😮 This side of the playa turns into dried up creek washes with deep ravines that just didn’t stop the entire way across. The truck doesn’t have a ton of ground clearance so we definitely dragged it on some spots.  Luckily it was sand!  However upon reaching the other side, you drive along the railroad tracks for a ways and I was expecting this at least to be a standard gravel road.  I’m not sure that it was really any better than the trail we just came off of!

I also have another “lessons learned” story… We stopped on the road next to the railroad to get some lunch out of the back of the camper but when Jason opened the door we realized that we had broken the mounts holding the cooler in place at some point during the day and tossed the cooler onto the floor upside down.  That was mostly fine because the cooler is electric and isn’t full of ice, but also not ok because I had a carton of milk in the cooler.  Not one of the kinds with the nice twist on lid, but one of the cartons that you just rip open and then fold back into place.  Fun fact: if those are upside down, they spill.  So now we have a carton of milk on the floor of the camper and since we put the lovely wood floorboards back in, we have milk underneath the floor and all over everything. Disgusting! 😮 We cleaned it up as much as reasonable and I may have been a little unreasonably mad about the whole thing.  This is now the third time we’ve flooded the camper floor with liquids.  I think I had a donut for lunch in protest. Needless to say, when we get home we’re just going to throw the flooring away and start over. Maybe with paint and a nice rug.