For this weeks Show Us Your California contest by Hive account@thesocalhive I head out for a camping trip in the...

Mecca Hills!!

The Mecca Hills is a badlands area in the Colorado desert south of the 10 freeway and north of the Salton Sea and the town of Mecca. The area is known for its maze of narrow cliff lined canyons and natural caves and caverns locally known as grottoes. Most of the year the Mecca Hills area is extremely hot so the cooler winter months is the best time to go out there. So my uncle, two of my cousins, and myself headed out there for a night of camping and grotto exploring. There are no campgrounds but dispersed camping is allowed and there is no shortage of dirt roads that have lots of good camping opportunities. We drove out one of these roads and picked a really great spot to camp. We explored a little bit around the area and then setup our camp, started up the campfire, and cooked up some dinner. After dinner we headed out on a night hike where we explored up a really awesome canyon that had some really cool grottoes that we climbed through. At points it was pretty challenging. Climbing up, crawling under, and squeezing through the different chambers in the caves. It was a lot of fun, unfortunately it's hard to get good photos at night in a cave so my grotto exploration pictures are pretty limited. So you'll just have to take my word about how amazing it was. After our grotto adventure we headed back to our camp for a fun night of hanging out by the campfire.

Looking south out at the Salton Sea from the southern edge of the Mecca Hills

Exploring the maze of dirt roads

Although the Mecca Hills is a barren desert area, with all the rain we've been getting in SoCal this year there were quite a lot of blooming wildflowers!

Exploring the maze of canyons

Some really interesting colors in the cliffs

Wildflowers

Wldflowers

Wildflowers

Exploring canyons

Finding our first little grotto

Inside the first grotto

More wildflowers

Exploring

Huge "swiss cheese" looking cliff

Exploring

Looking out the mouth of a slot canyon

Exploring up a rugged slot canyon

Setting up our camp

Campfire

Chicken on the fire

Night time grotto exploring

We ended up staying up pretty late so we slept in a bit and so by the time we got up and moving around it was already starting to get hot out. So pretty quickly after getting up we started packing up camp. While we were packing we ended up finding a bunch of scorpions crawling around. Which was pretty cool, but I'm glad I hadn't seen them before going to sleep the night before because I was cowboy camping(no tent) and would have probably been a bit scared if I had seen them first. Once packed up we headed back out the maze of canyons and dirt roads and then hit the freeway and headed back home.