The 30th Anniversary Tour, 9.19.22 - 10.15.22, Part 12 of 12: Gold Butte National Monument/Little Finland

If it isn’t obvious, I do a ton of browsing and research which leads me to discover all kinds of cool places to go that I had never been to and often never even heard of. I discovered Cathedral Gorge State Park in Nevada from a picture in a AAA magazine. White Pocket was totally unknown to me until I began to research the area around the Wave. Cathedral Valley in Capitol Reef I barely knew anything about. The list goes on and on and there are still so many places I want to go that I’ve heard of but never been. Our planet is so incredibly diverse and amazing and without getting into a debate about the whos, whats, whys and hows, all I know is that these amazing places need to be protected so generation after generation can be as awestruck as I have been when they see a place like a White Pocket, a Cathedral Valley or a Yellowstone for that matter.

One such place to add to this list was our last adventure before heading for home. Somewhere along the line I found photos of an obscure spot in the middle of the Mohave Desert called Little Finland. It turns out that Little Finland is just part of a larger area called Gold Butte National Monument. It is located in southeastern Nevada, east of Lake Mead but not too far from the western border of Utah. It has only been a national monument since 2016 and is still fairly unknown to the general public. Anyway, since Gold Butte National Monument is just outside the town of Mesquite, Nevada and since Gina recently bought a house in Mesquite, and finally since Mesquite is only a forty minute drive from St George, it sure made sense to me that we should see Gina’s new place and go check out Gold Butte.

Gold Butte has a number of cool things to see scattered around 300,000 acres of the Mohave Desert. In the summer it gets up above 115 degrees on a cool day and even as the calendar led up towards our arrival it was still in the mid-nineties in Mesquite. Despite the hot temperatures, we had big plans for Gold Butte. Little Finland is found deep in the interior of Gold Butte National Monument. From what I could tell, it was going to be another mind bending experience so we decided the best way to see it was to drive the Jeep in there and stay overnight.

The drive from Debbie and Darren’s in St George down I-15 into Mesquite was very scenic. We went through a nice gorge along the Virgin River and got to Gina’s place by nine-thirty in the morning. We parked the Navibahn in front of her house and then started packing up our overnight supplies into the Jeep. We had tons of water, a cooler for sandwiches and drinks and all our camping gear. We didn’t want to leave too early for fear we would get to Little Finland and die of heatstroke waiting for the sun to go down. It was hot but I didn’t think it felt insanely hot. We ended up heading out there around twelve-thirty. Bridgit, Gina and I drove out of Mesquite and turned onto the Gold Butte Road and parked. I aired down my tires to 15psi which took about twenty minutes because I need better tools for the job. But a double check of the air gauge and a triple check of the tire sensors in the Jeep left me confident I had done things correctly. Down the road we went. It’s a forty-four mile drive to Little Finland from Gina’s and takes about two hours.

We drove down the Gold Butte Road, which had been ordered to be paved back in the fifties by none other than Howard Hughes but never saw a lick of maintenance since so the road was just a jumble of brittle torn up pavement for the first bunch of miles. As we drove we were surrounded by every species of cacti you could imagine. Giant barrel cacti, cholla cacti, huge yucca plants and a forest of Joshua trees all dotted the landscape. This was without a doubt the most wildernesssy excursion we would do on this trip.

After twenty-two miles of chewed up pavement we came to a junction at a place called Whitney Pocket. By the way, since we kept going to assorted “pockets” I looked up what the definition of a pocket was in geologic terms and it is defined as a localized enrichment of minerals. You are now wiser than you were just a minute ago. At Whitney Pocket the terrain got much more interesting. Not that the first part wasn’t interesting if you like staring at an infinity of desert cactus. At Whitney Pocket we were now amidst bright orange and white rock formations.

Several offshoot roads took off from Whitney Pocket but we knew which direction and road to follow. We still had some eleven miles of much more primitive driving to do. To set the tone for the drive into Little Finland, I dialed up an album called “Even My Sure Things Fall Through” by a band out of Tucson called Calexico. Calexico is a great band and they have a southwestern almost Mexican flavor accented by Jacob Valenzuela’s trumpet and John Convertino’s great brush stroke on the drums. I cranked it up pretty loud and as we plied our way into the deeper bowels of the Mohave Desert through deep sandy washes lined with red rock and Joshua trees, it felt like we were being transported into a Sergio Leone movie. It was simply the perfect soundtrack for what we were doing.

Just to be on the safe side we used a Gaia track I had previously downloaded and we followed that towards Little Finland. It was another thirteen miles from Whitney Pocket to Little Finland and we hadn’t seen even one vehicle. The road drove through a dry wash for a ways and then gradually made almost a U-turn around the end of a rock ridge. From here we looked across a flat stretch of barren desert to a bright orange wall of rock on the far side. Big fat palm trees grew right up against the base of the rock wall. We had arrived at Little Finland. There was no sign, no parking area, no nothing but desert. We drove up to the base of the wall and got out to scope out our situation. Above us on the top of the wall, the edge was all just a row of jagged serrated rock. That was why we came.

We found flat spots by the base of the wall to set up our tents. I positioned the Jeep so that the afternoon shadow would give us a little shade to sit in our camp chairs. We actually did see one other vehicle in the area when we first pulled in. It was a couple and after an hour or so of walking around they left. They were the last people we would see until the next day when we got back to Whitney Pocket.

We wanted to wait for the sun to get lower in the sky before exploring so we sat in the shade in our chairs for an hour or two. It was actually very pleasant and none of us felt overheated. Around 4PM I ate my sandwich, loaded up my camera gear and took off for my afternoon shoot. Bridgit and Gina came up with me. A Jeep track went up a hill at the end of the rock wall so we followed it up to the top of the hill. From there we had access to the top of the rock wall. It is hard to describe what I found up there. Up top was more like a series of levels of rock ledges. The ledge that was right at the edge of the cliff was one of the most bizarre things I’d ever seen. Wind had sculpted the rock at the edge of the cliff into an absolutely insane array of twisted shapes. They hung out over the edge of the wall and you couldn’t walk on them for fear they would break off they were so fragile. Because the sun was now very low in the sky, as we looked down the length of the rim, deep orange light would fill the spaces underneath the top of the rocks so the entire cliff edge looked like glowing embers from a fire. And it wasn’t just the edge of the rim. All along the wall which was maybe a mile long were strange and crazy shaped rocks. It was easy to think that some looked like faces or animals and this other-worldly landscape forced our imaginations to run wild. Many had little holes through the rocks. some were pock-marked and probably would all be filled with water if it ever rained there. I left the girls and wandered all over up there until after the sun had completely gone down. I was trying all sorts of settings both with and without my polarizing filter. In truth, the color of the brilliant orange rock was so pure I really didn’t even need the polarizing filter which I sometimes use to bring out the colors in a scene. I even captured the very last light before the sun dropped below the horizon. It only lasted about fifteen seconds but with the sun so low, the muted pink light shown straight sideways and lit up the ledges. I was blown away by how amazing everything looked!

**The entrance to Gold Butte National Monument**

**The red rock wall we camped at the base of**

**Burning embers of rock. You can see our camp below the wall.**

**The butte behind the edge of the wall. There were tons of weird shaped rocks all over the place up there too.**

**The edge of the wall was too cool for words**

**We all saw a profile of a turtle sticking out his tongue!**

**Some kind of palm by our tent (Bridgit pic)**

Once the sun had fully set I headed back down to our camp. Gina and Bridgit were exhausted after our wild day and went to bed around eight. I stayed up just sitting in my camp chair. The moon hadn’t risen yet so we had a full view of the Milky Way right over our heads. The silence was palpable. There was no one within at least twenty miles of us and being so far out in the desert we really felt that we were all alone. It was really warm out. I was just in shorts and a t-shirt until almost ten-thirty. The low that night was only supposed to drop to sixty-six degrees and there wasn’t a hint of wind. Suddenly from out in the darkness I heard an extremely loud animal sound. For a second it scared the you know what out of me. I was more startled by the volume echoing across the desert floor than afraid. I knew right away that it was the bray of a lonesome wild burro. I even looked it up. There are three main reasons a burro will bray at night; to warn of danger, to express hunger or loneliness.

I was considering going back up onto the top of the wall to shoot in the moonlight. The almost full moon was supposed to rise just after seven but it took until ten-thirty for it to clear the butte above the wall. By then I had lost my enthusiasm so I took a couple of shots in the moonlight from our camp and went to bed.

In the morning I was up an hour before the sun and went back up to shoot. Because there was a fairly high butte east of the rim of the wall, the sun didn’t hit the rim until a bit later. I was able to get some good pre-sunrise photos and by hiking further over to where the sun came over a low point on the ridge I was able to catch sun on the cool rocks there. But I would say that Little Finland is definitely more of a sunset place as far as photography is concerned.

**Early morning light at Little Finland**

We were eager to check out the area around Whitney Pocket so we packed up after my morning shoot and drove back out. At Whitney Pocket we took a little side road to some rocks and parked. Walking around we found some great rock formations including a nice little arch. Then we drove back to GIna’s stopping at the highway to air back up first.

**Joshua trees on the way to Whitney Pocket**

**What were the odds that it was National Hug A Cactus Day?**

So we are coming to the end of the story. I will spare you the details of discovering a full on invasion of sugar ants in the Navibahn when we got back from Gold Butte. Suffice to say, we learned a few lessons but got it handled in an incredibly short period of time. We left for home the next day, driving up through the state of Nevada to the booming gambling mecca of Jackpot, Nevada. I don’t think we even left the campsite behind the casino and we were gone by 6AM the next morning. We both had a pretty good case of HTBS (horse to barn syndrome). We hadn’t seen Andrew in a month, I could hardly wait to start processing my photos and we had company coming, Andrew’s birthday and a gig all coming up in less than a week. So instead of one more night on the road, we drove a full twelve hours from Jackpot back to our home in Lake Stevens.

Looking back, it was an incredibly successful trip. We had very few problems, the weather was mostly remarkably great, we had enough flexibility to adapt to how everyone felt at any given time and we saw more amazing sights than we’ve ever packed into a trip without feeling like we were rushing around to see it all.

I really hope you enjoyed reading the story of our 30th Anniversary Tour. Please take the time to leave a comment but I can not reply directly to you from comments left on the website so if you wish to correspond or have me get back to you, please just send me an email at jbnewmark@gmail.com.

The 30th Anniversary Tour, 9.19.22 - 10.15.22, Part 12 of 12: Gold Butte National Monument/Little Finland

The 30th Anniversary Tour, 9.19.22 - 10.15.22, Part 11 of 12: Yant Flat/The Candy Cliffs

Ptarmigan Ridge, Coleman Pinnacle and Goat Lake, solo backpack, 8.30.22-8.31.22