The craziest thing about exploring offroad in Nevada is that a lot of the roads are literally along dry river beds.  So you’ll turn onto the road you want, down into where the water would be flowing if it rained, and carry on your way! Sometimes these paths take you through canyons carved by the water.  The scenery is always otherworldly and amazing!  It’s also extremely diverse.  We’re in the middle of the Mojave desert and you would expect hot sand (there’s definitely that as well…) but there are also mountains, rivers, rock formations and other unexpected surprises!

We drove for a few hours on rough terrain until we finally got to the top of the mountains.  The temperature here was much much cooler and there was even ice still!

We dropped back down over the mountains to the valley on the other side of them, which was mostly long lonely straight roads or paths down the river beds.

We passed through the valley and into the mountains on the other side of it (not the ones we just went over…) The roads got really rough and I didn’t get as many pictures.  We ended up driving through actual running water and found a slot canyon with a creek through it. (more on that later).

We missed our turn on the way out to get back on top and out of the creek bed, so we ended up bobbing along through the deep ravine for much longer than I was comfortable with. (literally, as a passenger it’s not very comfortable!)

After a few hours of driving and some backtracking we finally made it to our desired camp site for the night and set up our camp to make dinner and relax a little bit!

Not a bad way to end the day!  The 4Runner does fantastic on the desert roads with the new suspension and we almost have our camping set up dialed in for maximum (reasonable) comfort!  We need to get a good night’s rest to prepare for the next day’s adventure!