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 8^th

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 9^th

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 10^th

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.