This Racetrack
Category Archives: Death Valley
A trip to the mountains west of death Valley cont.
After driving all day Thursday, we all slept in on Friday.
But it did not take very long before the sun got bright enough and hot enough to wake us. After a quickie breakfast, we packed up
and hurried over to the Eureka Sand Dunes.
The Eureka Dunes are not very large or famous but they are among the highest dunes in the United States at over 650 feet above the valley floor. They look smaller because they are framed by the striped limestone cliffs of the Last Chance Range that rise up 3000 to 4000 feet higher. Sand dunes are caused by wind blowing across the valley floor and picking up fine dust and sand; as the wind hits the higher mountains, it slows down, loses energy, and drops its heavy load. One thing that I find interesting is that the the individual grains of sand are constantly changing but the size and shape of the dunes do not.
As an aside, after getting home I realized that, with four people on our trip, I took alot less pictures than I usually do when I am only with Michele. Among things I didn’t take pictures of were the beauty of the sand dunes. Fortunately, Kirk Moore has some wonderful sand dune pictures over at his website. I highly recommend that you take a look. End aside.
By the time we got to the dunes, it was starting to warm up and the dunes were getting very bright. We hiked up about half way, maybe 350 to 400 feet, on sand that got looser and looser.
About the time that the day starting getting really hot, heading towards triple digits. We got back in the truck and looked for shade. First it was back to the main road and then over the Last Chance Range into Death Valley itself. As we started over the last pass before Death Valley, we started seeing more plants in bloom. First the Beavertail Cactus, also known as the Pricklypear Cactus and probably known as some other names which is why people who like plants and go looking for them in the wild end up using the botanical name. In this case, Opuntia basilarus. Just as we got to the pass overlooking upper Death Valley, we came across lots of clumps of Desert Aster, AKA Mojave Aster, or Aster mohavensis.
Then it was down into Death Valley, past Crankshaft Crossing, and on to Scotty’s Castle where we had lunch in the shade.
A trip to the mountains west of Death Valley
Last Thursday I, along with my wife Michele and our friends Howard Dunair and Basha Cohen, spent the day driving down Highway 395. Highway 395 runs from Canada to somewhere in the Mojave Desert. Between Reno, where we got on to Big Pine, where we got off, 395 runs just to the east of the Sierras. Reno is at about 4500 feet and Big Pine is at about 4100,m but, from Reno, the road climbs to a pass of over 8100 feet so Big pine seems much lower.
The Mojave desert is the the UFO desert, the wacko desert, and it seems to have seeped up the 395 corridor. About an hour south of Reno, we ran into a guy who was pulling a cross from San Francisco to, I think, St. Louis. He had been saved by Jesus and wanted to save others. Like other people I have met who have been saved, he was sincere, open, passionate, and living so far from my reality as to be incomprehensible. I do admire his conviction, however.
Miles later, web got to an overlook and view spot with a guard rail. The guard rail has become a poster board for – for lack of a better word – travel stickers. I think that I first saw a bunch of travel stickers stuck on the windows of a a store – for foreigners – at the edge of the Sahara desert. Now I notice them anywhere tourists pass by, such as a guard rail at a view spot. Here – as Michele poinbted out – was an interesting group that showed one evolution of the Keep Tahoe Blue sticker.
As we moved south, after crossing the high point of Highway 395, we dropped from one basin to another, each one lower and warmer with the Sierras on our right getting higher and higher. Mile after mile.
Finally, at Big Pine, we turned left off of the highway and drove towards the deep desert.
And once we reached Eureka Valley, we stopped to drink a toast to the road.
To be continued….
A roundabout trip to Death Valley and back: back
Sometime during the night, the wind came up. I mean really came up. The next morning, Michele sort of slept in while the wind tore at our bag and erased our view by filling the valley with dust.
We packed – packing being defined as throwing everything in the back of the truck as quickly as possible – skipped coffee, and headed for the nearest coffee shop. Of course, the nearest coffee shop was 30 minutes down the fan, 15 minutes on a paved road, another hour on another dirt road – where we crossed the dry Amargosa River that I had crossed on New Year’s Day 1982 when it was covered with a thin layer of ice – and, finally, another 45 minutes on a paved road to Baker. Ready to break our fast.
After breakfast, we got on the highway from Las Vegas to Barstow that was pretty crowded with cars on heading back to LA. It was a big change from the day before.
Our plan, yesterday, was to go for a hike to Ashford Mine in Death Valley, but the wind put the kibosh on that. We both wanted to go walking somewhere – yesterday, we had walked less than we wanted because of the Golar Wash fiasco – but we really didn’t have any place in mind. The good news was that we had a lot of time in which to talk about it. First on the highway we were on, then on the road to Mojave.
After lots of discussion – lots of discussion because we had lots of time as the road went on and on – we decided to go for a short walk near the Tehachapi Loop and see if we could find a place to walk near the Kern National Wildlife Reserve in the Great Central Valley.
The Tehachapi Loop is on the rail line between Bakersfield in the Great Central Valley and Tehachapi Pass about 3,300 feet higher. The actual loop is the railway making a 360 degree turn and crossing over itself. I used to go by the Loop often on the way to Death Valley and once camped there but I was surprised to see how popular it has become.
We even ran into a couple from Holland.
Neither one of us had been to the Kern National Wildlife Refuge. It was in an area I used to drive through when I went out with a girl from the Great Central Valley but I had not been there since 1961. We figured it would be fun to see a couple of valley towns and check out the Refuge but we did not hold out much hope for the refuge being much of anything. The Valley was great with miles and miles of farms and small towns. The towns were much healthier than we expected with both the downtowns and the parks action packed on a Sunday afternoon.
When we got to the Kern National Wildlife Refuge, we were blown away. OK, bad choice of words, we were blown away trying to get into the Mad Greeks for breakfast hours earlier in the wind – but we were very impressed. It was a great place to end our trip, an oasis teaming with wildlife.
As the sun went down, we headed home. (Double clickable.)
A roundabout trip to Death Valley and back: post 4
The next morning, Michele – safe and sound in our beddy-bye with a wind break, just in case the wind comes up – slept in.
After a leisurely breakfast, we went for a walk. With the winter rains, the desert is alive: everything is happy and growing. We are used to flowers blooming at certain places, but what is really happening, all over the desert, is that certain flowers, at certain times, are growing and booming at certain elevations. At the elevation we were camped, lots of Eriogonum inflatums are growing. It is not one of my favorite plants but it is definetly one of my favorite plant names. Inflatum because its little stems are hollow and look like they have been inflated.
After our walk, we reversed our trip into the mountains by going down the alluvial fan on the other side, taking us into the Panamint Valley. Across the dried lake bed, we could see an active mine and, a couple of miles to the right, the alluvial fan we would be going up to get into the Panamint Mountains. From camp, last night, we could see the lights of a mine across the valley below us, but as we drove down the fan, we began to get an idea of its size. Double click on the second picture to get an idea of how big the mine is.
According to the Briggs Mine
information – prospectus? – they pulled 550,000 ounces of gold out of
this mine. At an average of $400 per ounce – maybe a number that is
high, but considerably under what gold is selling for now – that is
$220,000,000. It starts to make sense that they are moving all that dirt
and rock.
As we drove along the west side of the salt pan of the lower Panamint Valley, our plan was to skirt the pan at the southern end, go up the fan into Coyote Canyon / Goler Wash, and then follow it up over Mengel Pass to Stripped Butte Valley. We soon ran into trouble.
A steep, rocky section of the road, like this, is called a waterfall – usually it is dry, but, in this case, it was wet and slippery – and calls for a little coordination with the spotter telling the driver where to put the truck wheels. In our case, after trying the slippery part, I directed Michele to try a different angle and directed her too close to the edge. The road gave way and we were stuck: lodged off the side of the road on top of a big rock jammed under the front suspension and the rear wheel trying to slip even further off the road. Our concern was, that if we slipped too much, we would roll onto our side.
About two or three miles back down the road, we had seen some people camped; so I decided to walk down there for help. Fortunately, I ran into a couple of guys on their way up the canyon, in a nice Chevy 4 x 4, to try their luck, and, after going down to the other encampment to ask for help, the five of us – literally four men and a boy – headed back to the fiasco site.
As an aside; the driver of the Chevy was a Predator pilot, stationed near Las Vegas. According to the company brochure, the “Predator is a long-endurance, medium-altitude unmanned aircraft system
for surveillance and reconnaissance.” However, Predator is also armed with Hellfire missiles, so our new friend, here on for a weekend adventure, spends his work days – in a an air-conditioned building near Las Vegas – killing unsuspecting terrorists in Afghanistan. These terrorists are not really terrorists, they are unsophisticated, dirt poor, tribesmen, many with poor weapons and bad eyesight, that pride themselves on their manly warrioriness; and killing them – as Michele said – from a place near Vegas just seems wrong. But, he was helping us, so, not that wrong. End aside.
Unfortunately, none of us had a tow rope. Mine is in my garage – I know, worthless place to keep it – and the pilot’s was in his garage in Florida. After some general milling around to get the rock unjammed, another guy, in a Jeep Wrangler, showed up – and he did have a tow line. I am amazed at how easily the Jeep, with it’s big honker tires, was able to drive up and down the waterfall. We attached the line and he pulled us out -driving backwards – and then just continued to pull us up the waterfall.
After we got pulled up the waterfall and everybody left, Michele and I started back up Goler. I have been lots of places that were too steep or too wet and steep to get up, but this was the first time everything had turned to shit so fast. We were both rattled. We found it hard to be sure which road we should be on, let alone enjoy all the flowers and cactus.
After we missed a turn, to calm our nerves, we took a late lunch break under some cottonwoods on a short side road to the house where Charles Manson and his posse held up years ago. Now your first thought might be You are going to Charles Manson’s former house to calm your nerves? Actually, we thought we were on a different side road, but what ever bad Karma was left on the road when Mason left, was burned off by the last 25 years, or so, of sunshine and we left in a better mood than we arrived.
It still took us a while to get
over the pass including some wrong turns so we were very happy to look back and see the end of Golar Wash.
But, looking the other way, we had a long way to go including a short stretch where Howard and I had trouble a couple of years earlier. Then Howard did most of the work and, now, I would have to do most of the work. But, again, the short stretch turned out to be pretty easy going down hill and we soon got to the Geologist’s cabin. The Geologist’s cabin is double clickable.
There sometimes comes a time
when driving on rough roads is no longer fun, you just want to get
there, where ever there is, and that time had definitely come. Saying goodbye to Stripped Butte Valley, we picked our way up the road as fast as
we could, watching the sun get low.
After we left Stripped Butte Valley, we went down a very long Warm Springs Canyon and then down a huge alluvial fan into Death Valley. We were just in time to set up camp with a spectacular view (double clickable). After dinner, we sat by the fire feeling much better about the day.
To be finished here