Weekend trip to Otay Mountain and Ocotillo Wells

Hey everyone, you'll notice from the title of this one that it's not like the other posts I usually make on here.

Ouro is a place to get stuff done and be productive, but I also hope it can be a place to share any kind of content, even the everyday stuff.

So I made a #life team. The idea is it's a place to share adventures from real life. Think of it like Instagram but with more space to go a little deeper. Go beyond a short caption and reflect on the experience and share your stories here.

I've noticed there's an appetite for a place like this. People are tired of the shallow and inauthentic, and crave something a little richer and a little deeper.

So let's try it out!

This past weekend a couple friends and I went for a short camping trip into the desert of Southern California.

Ever since I moved to San Diego, going camping has been at the top of my list of things I wanted to do. I got a new tent for Christmas too so I'd been really wanting to break it out.

Well, I'm happy to say that did finally happen, but not without a story to tell.

So the trip started off a little backward. When most people plan a trip, the first thing they do is choose the destination and all the rest of the planning is centered around that.

Choosing a destination was the last thing we did.

We had a good idea of what we wanted to do:

• Cook up some steaks on an open fire

• Admire the stars

• Shoot some guns

Pretty simple. And there are a lot of places in Southern California that work for that.

So it felt like no matter what we chose it would work. We had narrowed it down to a couple spots and it was just about making the final decision between the two.

We couldn't have imagined it would have made the difference that it did.

We load up the car and decide on Otay Mountain. None of us had been there before and we expected it to be similar to some of the spots we'd been to before.

Only an hour and a half from Carlsbad too so the stakes were pretty low.

As soon as we get there, we find out it's not exactly what the online descriptions of it made it sound.

The road where the camping was supposedly off of was gated and locked shut. Feeling like we must have gotten something wrong, we asked someone working a nearby RV park what was up and she didn't give us much other than the code to unlock the gate and the directions to not tell the code to anyone else.

Strange.

She also mentioned that Border Patrol would be going up and down the path and we'd have to yield to them if that happened. Problem was the road was about 10 feet wide and cliff's edge was inches away.

But the view from the top of the mountain was incredible.

We trek all the way up to the top of the mountain, looking for a good place to set up camp.

Unfortunately one never came.

We found a border patrol agent to ask for any recommendations. He said that no one really camps around there and to avoid the mountain as people would be crossing over from Mexico during the night.

Not exactly ideal.

So we call an audible and continue east towards the desert.

Another hour and a half through California country was lovely. Sorry Midwest, but countryside doesn't have to be all corn fields.

We ended up in a place called Ocotillo Wells. I highly recommend it, but definitely try and plan for it during the winter months.

Not only was it in the 100s, but the wind made tent camping a little rough.

Learning the art of temperature control. With the wind as strong as it was, there were no problems getting the fire hot enough. There's definitely some technique in getting the cast iron to stay at just the right temperature. You want it pretty hot, but if you just leave it in the fire it will get too hot and everything will turn to ash. @seags made it look easy.

Bad day to be a can. Testing out the shotty with bird shot and a couple rounds from the 9mm. Learned there's such thing as active noise cancelling ear protection?

I learned a new constellation! Ursa Major. It's not in this picture but it was really cool. It's huge too; I don't think I've seen a constellation as big as this one.

One thing I found to help identifying them was playing around with taking my glasses off. Because there were so many stars visible (great problem to have by the way), it was hard to make sense of patterns from within all the "noise". When I took my glasses off, a lot of the smaller, dimmer stars faded away, leaving me with just the brightest. With fewer stars visible, recognizing Ursa was a lot easier.