I like to follow this guy, Steve. He goes to some interesting places. In this video, he discovers what looks like to be a bear canister with a set of numbers in it. I don’t believe it’s a plant by Steve. But these days, who knows. What’s the Mystery of the Mojave!?
Link to video (skip to the 11:00 minute mark if you are impatient).
Not everybody needs an incentive like the need for YouTube content to climb a hill. Some people just like to climb hills, and some of those people have a whimsical nature.
FWIW, back in my geocaching days cyphers were common among the contents. And we weren’t expending “effort” simply for the joy of scoring a find or hiding a cache. We did it because we liked hiking and exploring. It was just part of the fun of a good hike.
The alleged “rattlesnake habitat” is no longer on Google Maps. Clearly that name was part of the jest. Google Maps allows users to insert their own input.
Yeah, the phone booth on Zzyzx- came to be pure whimsy.
One hiking group I belonged to long ago had a journalist that wanted to go along- so they brought along a whole cold watermelon and made like that was a common thing to eat at the end of the trail.
In Outside magazine, there was a story about some guys (something like this has to be males, right?) brought a couch to the top of a mountain.
Whimsy.
But there is weird shit in that desert. Patton did maneuvers there, and you used to be able to see in the 70’s- tank tracks left over. We found a ww2 jeep in an arroyo, upside down, but otherwise not bad (engine compartment pretty smashed). We took the jeep tools. Looks like the GIs could have walked away- if they were lucky.
A lot of semi-precious gems, we were doing rockhounding. A weird tunnel that went thru a mountain- it is still there- for whimsical reasons. Abandoned mines. Burnt out VW vans (VW van vs tumbleweed). Etc.
As a point of reference, this showed up atop one of our local morros about ten years ago. It’s full-cow sized and made of thick fiberglass. It must have taken 3 or 4 guys a couple of hours to get it to the top of Islay Peak.
We paid our small donation, and walked thru it having had a long talk with it’s then owner. Altho it may have started as a mining tunnel, he just kept going, and it ends high on a mountain side, and the tunnel has no use whatsoever. Never did.
And it’s not. That is what’s known as a prank. And watching that video, it didn’t look like a particularly arduous or long hike. It’s not in the middle of nowhere; it’s rather close to a highway.
For anyone interested in exploring the region I recommend the two-volume set of “Bill Mann’s Guide to 50 Interesting and Mysterious Sites in the Mojave”
I think my favorite adventure in the Eastern Mojave was a Thanksgiving week hike to Fort Piute. The ruins of the fort were cool, but the best part of the hike was through Piute Creek Gorge with its narrow, picturesque rocky walls, petroglyphs and dense willow forest.
