Went camping this last weekend in Baja...Guadalupe Canyon, to be exact. The trip was a lot of fun, went with a bunch of co-workers, we're all pretty stressed out these days so it was nice to get away for a weekend. The camp has a mineral water hot tub at each site, of which I took full advantage. Did some hiking, some grilling, some drinking. All in all, it was a great weekend and I had a blast. This was the first time going with this particular group of people and we all got along really well and I think everyone enjoyed the trip. I meant to use this trip as the subject for my first custom Google map but, as luck would have it, my GPS receiver died that weekend so I was unable to geocode any of my photos. Speaking of photos...here's a group shot that my friend Andy took right before we left on Sunday.
It's about a 3-hour drive if you follow the directions through Tecate. Once you get off the highway 2 toll road in Baja you'll be on a dirt road for about 27 miles. Along the way, you'll see the fate of what could be called "less fortunate" campers.
We all arrived at roughly the same time, fairly late on Friday afternoon, so as soon as we set up camp we ate and then jumped in the hot tub and relaxed. Saturday morning a couple of us went hiking to try to find the waterfalls. As you probably guessed, not a lot of water feeding the waterfalls at this time of year, but it was still a fun hike.
That was one of the smaller waterfalls a bit higher up the canyon. On the way back down we stopped at the larger waterfall. This required some tricky maneuvering down the canyon, nothing too crazy.
And we finally arrived at the large waterfall. I would estimate this waterfall to be about 25-30 feet high at this point. I had to wade in knee-to-waist deep water to be able to make this photo. Normally, I would have shot a much longer exposure to get the water effect that I usually like but, alas, I didn't bring my tripod and, even if had, I wouldn't have carried it out on the hike. As you can see again, not a lot of water feeding the falls right now.
We ended up doing the same hike again in the afternoon since the rest of the guys were not able to make the morning hike. That time we spent a lot more time enjoying the cool water and just relaxing.
Some guy decided to dress up his chihuahua in his favorite team's jersey and take it out hiking with him.
Later in the day the wind started kicking up. Quite a bit, in fact, to the point where I had to find a way to anchor my tent. I would guess we were getting gusts up to 40 mph shooting down through the canyon. The weird thing was that right after the gust would pass, it would be perfectly calm. So calm, in fact, you could clearly hear the next gust coming down the canyon through the palm trees about 20 seconds before it would actually hit. Pretty weird experience. Unfortunately, no one really slept much that night. For some reason, I had this fear that the structure under which we were camping would collapse on top of me since the gusts were so strong, so I didn't sleep well at all since a gust would come through every 30-45 seconds.
Sunday morning we broke camp and hit the road. On the way out we all went through the dry lake bed instead of the dirt road which I took on the way in. This allowed us to travel a bit faster than we would have been able to otherwise. Well, at least until we ran into some nasty sand clouds kicked up by wind. It got so bad in some spots that you couldn't see more than 20 feet in front of your vehicle and speeds slowed down to about 10-15 mph. This is a shot from the cab of my pickup looking at Andy's Jeep, which I was following fairly closely at this point.
Anyway, a great weekend. I would recommend that spot, the only minor issue we had was that the locals, who are responsible for taking care of the camp, can get a bit combative. They started yelling at us because they thought one of our vehicles had run over one of the PVC pipes running water to our camp and broken it. After a few minutes of me explaining to the guy that it wasn't anyone in our group, and that the water level on our tub was several inches low indicating it hadn't been receiving water in a few days, they finally apologized and went about fixing the pipe. Take a Spanish-speaker with you, if possible.