After a nearly five-month hiatus, I was finally able to return to JTree for a day to see what I could find. The withdrawls had been wreaking havoc, what with seeing amazing photos posted on social media from the great explortographers I follow. But I was finally back amidst the quartz monzonite, desert silence and unknown territory.

The main portion of my day was spent in White Tank Campground’s surrounding rocky hills and boulder fields. There’s something special about this area, the concentration of giant boulders that invoke the imagination run amok. Everywhere you look, something is looking back at you. It’s impossible to not be amazed and occasionally spooked while hiking on and off the trails at White Tank.

Besides wandering through enormous boulders, squeezing through narrow gaps, crawling under sharp rocks, inspecting concavities in stone, receiving scrapes and bruises almost without realizing it, climbing hills because they were hills and warranted climbing, all the while looking to see what I could find, I did have two specific goals for this walk-a-bout.

Find Vulture Arch

Locate Tom Brody’s Heart

Fours hours and five miles later, I was a bit worn out. Here are some things I saw along the way, in no particular order.