Death Valley 160331

We drove out to my parents house on Saturday afternoon when Amanda got off work and left there Sunday morning after I changed the oil and rotated the tires on my truck. We left the Fresno foothills around noon and arrived at the campsite in death valley at 7:00pm.

Along the way we watched the wilderness around us. It always seems like the moment you cross into a national park the plants look healthier and things seem wilder. Was it always this way and we used this line to draw the boundary of the park or was the boundary arbitrary and has active conservation drawn a boundary over the years as off road vehicles, cattle ranchers, and other unregulated human activity destroyed everything outside the park?

We arrived just after the sun set and spent a few anxious minutes idling through the texas springs campground looking for a spot to stop. We set up our tent to claim the site but slept in the back of the truck under the stars. It was a nice warm night.

The next morning we learned there was an additional $14/night fee for staying at the campground so Amanda went down and paid for several days and we drove off to find the titus canyon.

A chuckawalla stick:

Titus Canyon

Titus Canyon is a one way road that runs through a slot canyon. It's meant for four wheel drive vehicles and it starts just outside the park in Nevada.

There was a freshly dead burro at the start of the dirt road. It was surrounded by broken side mirrors and other shattered plastic pieces from the car that hit it.

We stopped several times on the dirt road to walk circles over the landscape hunting lizards. Amanda caught about six tiny side-blotchches ranging in color from jade green to orange polka dotted. Along the way we interrupted a peregrine falcon who had just taken down an avocet.

Along the trail we were overtaken by a continuous stream of tourists driving rented jeeps. They weren't as careful about destroying the suspension or breaking something by driving too fast on the washboard roads.

The slot canyon was cool. Near the end you wind down a narrow track between polished stone walls.

Here's a video:

We stopped at leadfield halfway down the drive to eat lunch and check out the old mines. Every one was barred off and there were warning signs telling us about all the outlandish things that would happen to us if we found an unlocked mine and dared to venture inside. The list included poisoning by asphyxiating gas and finding old unexploded tnt.

At a rock with petroglyphs we spotted a chuckwalla and Amanda crouched by it's burrow for ten minutes until it popped it's head out. It dodged her noose and climbed higher up into the crevice.

We accidentally photographed the lizard in the upper left hand corner of the second picture above. We didn't notice it until we climbed up to get a better look at the petroglyphs.

The indians know but won't tell us.

On the way out of the canyon we emerged into the open desert and saw a hazy cloud obscuring the distance. It was a dust cloud driven by sixty mile per hour winds and we soon had to slow to fifteen miles per hour as the blowing sand obscured everything ahead in a white out. Gravel rattled against the side of the truck.

A video:

There were other places we wanted to see that day but we decided to change plans and see if our tent was still standing.

videos:

The Tornado

It wasn't. When we arrived it was like a scene from a disaster movie. There was an ambulance idling with flashing lights, about 10 rangers and other law enforcement milling about, a pop up camper trailer was smashed upside down in the center of the road, there were several ripped tents and random debris stuck in the bushes between the sites.

The wind was still blowing at forty miles per hour or more and several of the aluminum picnic tables were in the bottom of the ravine with broken seats and rounded corners like they'd rolled there. A man with a bandage around his head come out of the bathroom and hugged his family.

People with large campers were running around like ants trying to stabilize their vehicles or to move them to a better spot.

Our tent poles were broken, the rain fly was gone, and someone had dragged a picnic table over onto it to keep it from flying away in the wind. The little gear we had was still inside; a fold up table and chairs, our new campstove, and our bag of potatoes.

We secured as much as possible and while Amanda packed it in the cab of the truck I walked around and took pictures of the carnage.

some videos:

Apparently three funnel clouds appeared right above the campsite and knocked over the trailers, lifted tents two hundred feet into the air, and knocked picnic tables into people. We walked downwind to see if we could find our rain fly but it was probably miles away.

Most people establish a base camp and leave their tent and stuff there while they explore the park so most were away when the tornado hit and they had an unpleasant surprise when they got back that evening. After securing our tent we took down two other tents to prevent them from getting damaged further.

More than half of the people with reserved sites abandoned camp sites that day so we took the opportunity to drive around and find another, more sheltered spot. Our tent was smashed and it was threatening to rain so we used my tarp, one of Amanda's trekking poles, and bungee cords and webbing to make our own tent in the back of the truck. It worked out well when it rained later that night.

The wind reversed direction that evening and as we sat by the truck a frightened looking man came over asking if we'd seen his tent. He said the stakes were still in the ground and the grommets had been torn from the fabric. We suggested it might be one of the several that were in the bushes and succeeded in recovering some of his stuff.

We went to the ranger station a little before they closed and the help desk assured us the weather would calm down overnight.

Zabriskie hike

The next day we did a seven mile hike at zabriskie point and then drove out to Dante's peak for lunch.

On the way back we visited the salt stream and saw the endangered pupfish spawning a fighting like it was going out of style. It was, with the seasonal droughts in death valley, their population is sometimes reduced to only five adults before the water comes back.

That evening the wind was calm enough to start a campfire with the little wood we'd brought with us but an hour later it rose to thirty or forty miles per hour and I had to douse it with our water and surround it with rock to keep the sparks to setting our neighbors tents on fire.

The other people in the camp scurried around in a mild panic - remembering how bad it was the night before.

We setup our macguyver tent and went to bed early.

Mosaic Canyon

On Wednesday we packed up everything and started our leisurely trip back to Monterey.

When I went to the dumpsters to throw out our trash I noticed someone had thrown their tent in with the poles. It looked like a newer Kelty tent that had been ruined by the tornado. Before the trip we had almost bought one for $300 at rei.

On a whim I pulled it from the dumpster and discovered that although the aluminum poles were comically bent and the rain fly was torn up one side it was mostly intact. I carried it back to our campsite and stashed it in the box with our firewood. Later that day Amanda pointed out it belonged to the guy that was camped two sites down. I don't know if he saw me fishing his tent out of the dumpster.

A video:

On the way out of the park we stopped at Mosaic Canyon, another dry stream bed walled by smooth stone and carpeted with sharp gravel. We followed the riverbed for a while before turning up into one of the side passages. It was near noon when we started heading back and just warm enough for the lizards to begin to come out.

I decided to walk back along the narrow ridge forty feet above the ravine while Amanda chose to take the safer route and retrace our steps. About half way back she stopped and cried out and I sat on the ridge above her with my binoculars and watched her noose a small chuckawalla when it ventured out of a crack in the rock.

When it was securely in hand, I scrambled down to meet her and we chased several lizards. Amanda snagged but lost the same spastic whiptail three times before it went into a hole and we both caught a few side blotches. I caught a small chuckawalla that chose to hide under a small flat rock.

The parking lot was full when we got back to the truck. We stopped again in the valley to look for other lizards but the weather was cool and overcast and the ground was too rocky.

Outside the valley at the edge of a dried lake bed we went hunting again and caught a few small desert iguanas. Finding them was a matter of wandering the rock strewn wilderness until they darted away at full speed to a bush or flat piece of land thirty yards distant. They would usually wait while we setup our poles and circled their position.

When Amanda could get cell service we looked up different routes back. We could go north through Bishop and then through Yosemite or the Sonora wilderness to get around the Sierra range, or south through tehachapi, the way we came in, or on highway 178 following the kern river. I'd never been on 178 though google said it was only 20min slower than Tehachapi pass.

Amanda found references to several campsites along the way including some natural hot springs and BLM land near the kern river.

I think this picture speaks for itself.

Highway 178

The scenery along 178 was pretty. I'd never seen such a dense forest of joshua trees and the highway along the kern river reminded me of the merced. It was a weird mixture of joshua trees, oak, and pinion pine. It rained a few times as we drove and Amanda was convinced some of it fell as snow.

We followed the instructions on her phone and it took us along the river to a turn out with a twenty parked cars. As we pulled up a couple were getting into their car. They looked damp and warm.

We got halfway down the steep trail to the pools when Amanda realized she needed to use the bathroom and she took the keys to the truck while I continued down.

The pools weren't huge but they were free. I was curious if they were filled with clothed or nude people and discovered they were all clothed though in a smaller tub off to the side there was one middle aged man in the buff holding one leg in the air. I'm not sure what he was doing.

I asked if there were other pools and the group replied this was it and they wouldn't mind if I stripped nude. "I'll close my eyes as you get in!" one girl reassured me. I told them I would wait for my girlfriend to arrive.

Amanda had been practicing driving stick while we toured death valley. She's better but still not confident on hills or in traffic. She drove up just as I reached the top of the steep trail.

I ended up going in nude after all. The man who held his leg in the air had abandoned his pool and we took his spot. Amanda didn't like bathing in the dirty water but I didn't care after four days in the desert.

Afterwards we drove down the road and setup our dumpster tent. I discovered the could be bent by hand but I didn't want to put too much force on them in case metal fatigue would cause them to snap. The tear up one side seemed fixable. It was perfectly adequate for camping that night on the side of the road and much better than our old tent.

The campgrounds along the river wanted $23/night but we didn't want to pay. There were no signs indicating we couldn't just camp along the road near the hotsprings but we were a little nervous about having to explain ourselves to a ranger in the middle of the night.

Our site was in view of the highway but it was nice. We cooked a quick dinner and went to bed at 7.

That night at 10:20 we awoke to a car pulling up to the truck and lighting up our tent with their headlights. They revved their engine a few times and I could hear their tires crunching on the gravel but by the time I unzipped the door and stood up out of the tent the were already down the road. I suppose they only wanted to use our little campsite to turn around.

Bakersfield and the drive home

We got up early the next morning under a layer of frost and hurried through breakfast and packing to get on the road again. Before getting on the highway we stopped at the $23 campgrounds to use the bathroom and the river was pretty in the early morning.

Bakersfield is shithole of concrete and poverty bleached in the hot sun but the orange orchards were blooming and they smelled nice. I wasn't so happy by the huge almond groves and the hundreds of bilboards telling us about how jesus loved us, that you can't grow food without water, that the drought was caused by politicians, that we should build more dams instead of mass transportation, and than most of the water was being stolen by greedy environmentalists. You can see the billboards here

We stopped at pacheco pass on the way back to see dinosaur point. I'd hoped to see a skeleton or something but there was only a fee to park down by the water. We ate lunch in the shade cranberry pumpkinseed bread and carrots before continuing on into Monterey.