I've been to Red Rock Canyon State Park a number of times, but never posted stuff up. So here's some stuff for posterity:
The official state park website for Red Rock Canyon
Info from DesertUSA
Info from American Southwest dot com
The state park is located just north of Mojave on the 14. From LA, you take the 5 north to the 14 north and then follow the 14 through Mojave, with the park about 15 miles out of Mojave.
Click on the map to take you to the google maps page:
There are a number of routes inside of the park. Good maps can be gotten at the
Jawbone Canyon Visitor Center just before Red Rock on the 14. Many of the runs in Red Rock are also described in popular offroad trails books such as
Backcountry Adventures and
Backroads and 4x4 Trails. Last Chance Canyon is probably one of the more well know, but there are many fun trails out here.
So the rest of this post is mainly narration of photos of cool stuff in the park.
It turns out you can't shoot or burn tents in the State Park (this does detract from the fun, a bit):
This is the approach to Last Chance Canyon from the south:
Entering Last Chance Canyon:
Gratuitous photos of my truck in Last Chance Canyon:
I still think we could have made it up here, just needed a recovery vehicle on standby
:
More shots in Last Chance:
Once through the Canyon, you start to notice that alot of the rock is consolidated volcanic ash:
This is the most difficult bit of the whole trip - it's just a steep hill with some steps. Pretty easy stuff. Ran it cleanly the first time with a totally stock truck - so this area is not for extreme rock crawling:
More ash and old mine works:
Bickel Camp is an interesting place. It's listed on some of the maps as an open air museum. It's the remnants of the old home of one Walt Bickel. The home forms the basis for a collection of parts left in the Red Rock area used for mining and surviving whilst mining. More info about it can be found by looking at the
Bickel Camp dot org website. When I was there, the camp was staffed with caretakers that live on site and can give a colourful tour of the various museum collections. They also lent us a flash light to go up to Burro Schmidts tunnel (coming up next). A donation of just a few dollars is asked for, so have something ready or if you want to avoid, be forewarned. Here are some photos at Bickel Camp:
