November 8 through 15, 2015
October has flown by with lots of
kitchen renovation activity at the Dixons in Los Angeles. There has
been demolition of cabinets, counter and floor; repair and tiling of
the floor; repair of the walls and ceiling; new electric (Henk crawls
under the house a few times - *shudder*) as well as moving of the gas
line; cabinet assembly and placement; hauling and cleaning of fridge
and freezer; and filling of the dumpster. Meanwhile Deirdre managed
life from a camp kitchen and picnic table on the back patio and the
children enjoyed having quite a bit less than the usual supervision.
So the house seriously needs cleaning and we, the work crew,
seriously need a little vacation. So we take off with the RV for a
week in Death Valley NP.
Sunday Nov 8th
We plan our “escape” via route 14
from Acton. Before we even reach Palmdale we decide on a really early
lunch at Lupe's across from the Home Depot. We discovered this little
place a few weeks ago. It's so tucked in a corner you can hardly find
it. We circled the block twice before Opa Henk saw it. They have
awesome food, everything home made, cooked and served by the abuelo
and the two ladies in the cocina in the back. They cater too –
we're wondering if tamales are suitable for Thanksgiving?
The fun starts when we're leaving the
HD parking lot and we notice one of the basement doors is open. It
turns out the lock is stuck in the closed position with the door in
the open position. How? No idea! Good thing Henk has his tools...
The lock cover comes off and after a good few tries he can get the
pin pushed back. We're glad we stopped for food, otherwise this would
have happened on the highway...
We continue north through Mojave to 395
until we're almost at Lone Pine, directly east of Sequoia N.P.,
behind the Sierra Nevada. Then we turn east on 190 to cross over the
Argus mountains and to Furnace Creek campground down below in
Death Valley. We checked beforehand in the Good Sam RV Atlas that
this route was recommended for trucks and RVs, and yes, it showed the
green shading, so we're good. We relax as we go and enjoy the Mohave
desert landscape. Because Argus is a mountain range we're not
surprised there is a pass involved, but it looks OK on the map – we
don't see hairpins. High up, at 4000', we stop at a lookout stop to
gaze into the valley ahead. Beautiful. And there we see the road,
cheerfully switching back and forth down the ridge Hmmm... wait...
there's another mountain range in between... Henk rides the low gears
and the exhaust brake down and around the mountain side. There are
little signs along the side of the road, one every 1000'. We go from
4000' down to 2000' into Paramint Valley; up to 5000' over the
Paramint Range; and then later we'll finally get down into Death
Valley. The mountains have a forbidding beauty. The road is plenty
steep; on the uphill parts the RV, with the pedal to the metal,
barely makes it to 30 MPH.
However, we don't make it to sea level
and Furnace Creek. Once we're over the Towne Pass on the east side of
the Paramint Range, we see an ominous sign: 17 miles downward at 6 to
8 %. The exhaust brake and the gears don't help enough and the front
brakes are smoking about halfway. We stop at a pull-out for 45
minutes to let them cool off and thus miss our window to get to
Furnace Creek before dark. So we stop at a tiny campground – tents
only! - at Emigrant, a few miles further down. We're conspicuous. We
apologize to the neighbors for the burned rubber smell after Henk
tucks the 40-footer into a tent spot. This was definitely the wrong
route! We feel stupid. But we checked before. We had no way to know:(
Mon Nov 9th
We get back on the road for more miles
of 6% descent after we wait a bit for most tenters to leave, and soon
we come to Stovepipe Wells Campground. There is lots of room there
for RVs. We decide to stay at this one, because, we can drive to the
visitor center at Furnace Creek with the Honda all we want, and,
we're still rattled from yesterday. It's quiet here with lots of Big
Sky north to south and beautiful faraway mountains east and west.
After getting settled we head to the Furnace Creek Vis.Ctr. for
information on a little something to do. We notice there is cell
phone reception, but only for messages; admire the huge relief map;
listen to the ranger talk about the sun; and pick our afternoon
activity, a drive to Zabriskie Point and Dante's View. The road
swings to the east behind a smaller mountain range, the Black Range
or something. First, at Zabriskie, we park and walk up the paved
trail to the overlook. Lovely view but windy. A little further up we
take a dirt road to Dante's View that rises gently with the terrain
behind the Black Mountains, then steeply up the last piece, and end
up on a cold and very windy parking lot at the top. We're over 5900'
high, more than a mile up, and have a clear view of the Badwater
section of Death Valley – the salt flats where the valley floor is
at -282' – and of the Paramint Range across. It is AWEsome. And
cold.
Tues Nov 10th
A lady at the visitor center told us
about Titus Canyon yesterday, and this is our plan for the morning.
It's a one-way dirt road that starts in Nevada, beyond the east
boundary of the park. We overshoot to visit the tiny town of Beatty,
buy gas, don't find a grocery store, and stop at a parking lot
because it turns out we have awesome cell phone reception! After
checking email and Facebook ;) we head back to the turn-off for
Titus. It starts as a bumpy and boring drive across the high desert,
but then we dive into upper Titus Canyon. The road twists and turns
and after every turn it's more awesome. The mountain walls are red,
green, black, gold; the road is so narrow, so full of holes, and
barely chiseled out of the side of the walls... We see (and stop to
check) large hail pellets, they are soft-serve but definitely hail
shaped, not snowflakes. There were gray clouds over this section this
morning. Obviously something fell out of them :)
We pass a few old, and obviously
abandoned, mines: first they mined copper, then lead, now it's a
ghost town. We have lunch in front of one of them. A bit further down
starts the last part of the canyon, a slot canyon, with its steep and
high carved walls and narrow floor. We drive through the pebbles at
the bottom where the flash floods rage when it rains. Those rain
clouds this morning – we're sure it's OK because our dirt road
wasn't closed, right? – but yet, we're kind of relieved when we
suddenly break out of the canyon onto the sunny and warm valley
floor. That was fun in a scary sort of way. Scary in a fun sort of
way. Life is full of adventures!
From here we drive north towards
Scotty's castle. This is normally a tourist attraction, but it's
closed now since that enormous rain storm in mid October. It's in yet
another canyon, and yes, it got buried in mud, stones, and debris. It
will take months to clean and repair. We are however not on our way
to Scotty's; rather, we're looking to add a volcano to our
collection: the cindercone Ubehebe and Little Hebe craters. One is
2000 yrs old and the other 500. Hardly dead! There is a rim loop we
can take around the both of them, so we crunch uphill through the
cinders, an exhausting half mile to the rim of Ubehebe. Here we
chicken out of the rim loop, because it is very, very cold and very,
very, very windy. We cindersurf back down the half mile and duck into
the sun-warmed car. 46 degrees outside, says the display. With the
windchill, brrrr.
Wednesday 11/11
Today we plan a lot of short walks.
First we head to Badwater, the farthest south, to venture out onto
the salt flats. This we do early in the day, because it is where it
gets the hottest. It may be chilly at higher elevations, but it's
nice and warm down below. After the boardwalk and the first part of
the flats where most people stroll on the salt, we go out a little
further. Here we walk on damp salt with fuzzy looking mini-salt
crystals. The rain from yesterday dissolved some salt and now it's
crystallizing right back. Henk takes pictures of larger crystals
growing in tiny pools. Amazing.
Beyond Badwater the road is still
closed since the same October storm. We turn back north – all our
other stops are one after the other, spread out mind you, on our way
back to the campground - and head for Golden Canyon. This is another
slot canyon which has (you guessed) gold-colored walls. We spot veins
of, borax? It's definitely not quartz, the structure is different.
Next we stop at the Furnace Creek VC
and have lunch in the shade. There is music going on on the patio,
where the ranger talk on lizards was going to be, so instead the
ranger comes to us at the picnic tables. Her name is Naomi and she is
quite a character. She tells us about the 007 lizards and the Beach
Boy lizards – no, not their real names ;) - and mentions Rodney the
resident roadrunner as well. She also explains why there is music:
apparently there is a group of people (she rolls her eyes and hopes
to die before becoming a member of them), calling themselves the
49ers, and the second week of November they get together in Death
Valley to commemorate that, back in, yes, 1849, a group of
golddiggers, on their way to California, stubbornly took the wrong
route even though they were warned against it. Naomi doesn't think
such folks, having brought their troubles upon themselves, deserve to
be commemorated ;). They didn't even die or starve or anything;).
Someone went for help and got back with extra food, so no big deal,
says she ;). This, btw, explains the unexpectedly large number of
RVs at the Furnace Creek campground. We're glad we're in Stovepipe
Wells!
Next stop: the Harmony Borax Works, one
of those you must see because of the Death Valley history, but
otherwise, ehh. So on to the last place for a short walk: Salt Creek.
A mile across the valley floor desert to an opening between two
slight rises. Here is a long 'lollipop' board walk through a
surprisingly green little mini-valley. The signs explain about
pickleweed, that store excess salt in their leaves and simply start a
new leaf when the salty one gets too salty; and pupfish, who can live
in water four times saltier than the ocean. We hear water trickle
under the board walk and see a tiny stream appear and disappear
between the plants. It's a magical place... We see a cute little
Virginia rail wading in the little creek, and where the boards cross
over the water near the salt spring we try to see pupfish. No luck,
but instead we see the footprints of a heron in the sand on the creek
bottom. No wonder there are no fish to be seen ;)
After dinner we drive back to Beatty
because Henk has a D.I. phone meeting. I plan to write and post a
blogpost, but as usual I write way too much. Maybe Friday.
Thursday Nov 12
In the morning we hike up Mosaic
Canyon, which is right next to our campground. It's another slot
canyon, this one with wide mini-valleys between the narrows. It has
fantastic, slick, polished breccia walls, with the pebbles and broken
chunks in the sandstone cut and polished smooth with the surface of
the wall. We enjoy the canyon while we hike through gravel in the
lower section, clamber over slickrock, hike through more gravel, then
we climb around a rock fall. Two more steep and narrow slickrock
events later we wonder why, so we turn back and enjoy the canyon all
over again on our way out. There are very few plants here, but the
ones we see are tiny and stuck in silly tiny crevices.
In the afternoon we repair back to the
visitor center, where Naomi leads a small group of us to the golf
course (yes, there is a golf course) to see what birds we might spot.
Three in the afternoon, she huffs, they gave me this time on the
schedule, but what birds do you see at three in the afternoon? A
white pigeon flies over as she speaks, then a small flock of
starlings. We hear a northern flicker. Rodney the roadrunner strolls
by, showing off his crest, hoping for a handout. At the viewing
platform at the golf course pond there are horned larks, coots, a
wood duck, pipits, marsh wrens, phoebes, and! a vermilion flycatcher!
Super rare! Naomi and one of the birder guys bubble over with
happiness. Across the pond we watch a coyote with a mind to have coot
for dinner, but they spot him in time. We stay until the afternoon
wanes. A cooper's hawk flies down the road when we leave, and he sits
patiently in a little tree while we all take his picture.
Friday Nov 13
We're driving home today. There are
even more 49ers at the Furnace Creek campground, which makes this a
good time for us to leave ;) We take 190 east, then 127 south, so
we're not going up and over Towne Pass and not over anything much
else either. I of course worry about the brakes – it's Friday the
thirteenth, after all...
Before we get to Baker on the I 15 a
bicyclist flags us down. He's riding dirt roads to Death Valley
(alone! aaak!) and wonders if he can buy any water from us? We fill
all his containers, give him an extra gallon and a good long drink
from one of our many other gallons, and refuse money. I find out
later it's national kindness day. We don't need a special day.
On the 15 we stand still for an hour,
no idea why, there is a helicopter in the sky, six police cars on the
road, but only one car with its hood up at the side of the road. We
had feared the worst but apparently it was not a fatal accident or
something. Maybe an armed robber ;)
Tonight we are the only campers on a
San Bernardino County park campground in Victorville. Tomorrow we're
off with the car to Redlands for D.I., and afterwards north to
Palmdale, via 138 which runs on the east side of the San Gabriel
mountains. This avoids any kind of mountain driving so I can stop
worrying about the brakes;) We'll make an appointment for the RV to
have its annual service some time next week. Tomorrow we'll stay over
at the Palmdale WalMart for one night, so when we get back to our
favorite campground in Acton on Sunday we can take advantage of an
extra good deal.
We didn't know anything much about
Death Valley other than that it's a desert and it gets hot in the
summer. We had no idea - we have seen more natural beauty this Fall
than in multiple other years together! Well, yes, of course you're in
the desert at Death Valley. Creosote brush, sage and coyotes. Not
exciting. But! There were so many things to enjoy it's unbelievable!
I'm using that word a lot lately but it's true. And it's November,
which means it was not hot either. We need to come back maybe in the
Spring or next Fall for more. It will take many visits to see it
all... just like Yellowstone and Utah. Enough for years to come.
Life is good.