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

We turned left towards Trona and, after a few minutes, passed a recreation vehicle area. This is an area where people who want to come to the desert to rip the shit out of it with their motorcycles and 4x4s – known as off road vehicles (ORV) – can just drive around. I don’t know the details, but the rules seem to be that you can drive anywhere with anything.

Giving both the TreeHuggers and ORVs separate playgrounds is one of those things that the government really seems to do well. Everybody is pretty happy playing in the desert. Speaking of which, when people think desert plants, they think cactus, but most plants in the desert are not cactus. The preferred survival strategy seems to be Wait around for rain, bloom and produce seeds as soon as possible, get the seeds dispersed, and wait around for the next rain. Which is why, after a couple of well timed rains, the desert will be filled with carpets of flowers. Cactus, and alot of other plants, honker down and sort of hibernate between rains. So, while they can take harsh conditions, they can’t take really harsh conditions like annuals.

But, when the conditions are right, they can be very happy, like this Opuntia basilaris living between tracks at the Wagon Wheel ORV Area.

Further down the road, on the way to Trona, is the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake at Ridgecrest. China Lake is a misnomer, there is no lake there – atleast not what we would call a lake. I guess it is called a lake to sort of justify having a Navy Base in the middle of the desert. I am not sure why the Navy has a base there except that it is left over from WWII when the military grabbed every piece of available land and, now, they don’t want to let go.

Trona, on the other hand is actually on a lake, Searles Lake. The lake sits in a shallow basin and is usually very shallow although it used to be over 600 feet deep. Now what is left is a couple of hundred feet deep lake bed of dried salts and minerals that are being mined by the Searles Valley Minerals Company and Trona is, more or less, it’s company town.

I would like to be snarky about Trona but over the years, I have become sort of protectively fond of it.  When I first saw Trona, the mine – factory? – was run by Kerr-McKee and it was, by far, the worst place I have ever seen. As an aside; I hold the position that Kerr-McGee is the most evil company in the world and that was before I saw Silkwood. Kerr-McGee sort of makes the PG&E of Erin Brockovitch look like the Red Cross; end aside.

It seemed, then, that Kerr-McGee dug up the dried salts and minerals and blew them in the air – apparently for the fun of it. The whole area was covered with a gray layer of salt and mineral fallout. Everything, the rundown buildings, the dirt football field at the highschool, the road and all the trucks on them, everything. Now, with Searles Valley Minerals Company replacing Kerr-McGee, Trona is close to infinitely better than it used to be.

Sure, the football field is still dirt but the school buildings are newly painted and, most importantly, the dust is gone. Cars are shinny, buildings are clean, and there is a nifty shinny pipey thing across the dried lake. The town looks alive.  It is also worth keeping in mind that, without the Tronas of the world, we wouldn’t have computers or iPhones or the Hubble telescope.

The rest stop looks pretty dismal, but not if you had seen the old Trona; and the new information kiosk has a good map of the area and real information. Although, I have to admit, the Biocarb^® is a little creepy.

From Trona – at the upper left of the map below – our plan was to drive to Death Valley via a couple of old, dirt – rock? – roads over, first, the Slate Range, and, then, the Panamint Range ending near the small blue square at the bottom mid-right of the Google map. Double click to get it large enough to read.

Continued here