I have organized this story a bit differently than most.
Some of the locations have little or no reporting on the internet and I feel they should remain that way or someone I respect has personally requested that I not share them; as such, locations have been redacted and/or not mentioned, I've used non-official names for local landmarks, and the order of the trip has been randomized.
Please, if you know the locations shown here, I encourage you to enjoy them as much as I did - and follow my lead by not mentioning their names or locations in order to keep them a little less well-known, and special.
For more on my approach, you can read Do you have a GPX for that?.
Six months earlier, I'd built our very last, late spring trip to Death Valley - with temperatures already climbing into the unbearably hot range for us Pacific Northwesterners - around Greenwater Valley, for a single purpose: to find an unusual rabbit petroglyph that I'd uncovered on the internet.
We never found it.
That meant that somewhere out there, a rabbit was hiding in plain sight, and while it had eluded us on our last search, we weren't going to be outsmarted a second time by some wascally wabbit!
Trailhead-to-trailhead taxi.
With only 90 minutes until sunset, we arrived at the trailhead. Grabbing only my camera and a bit of water, we headed off into the desert, hoping - perhaps naively - that we would be back with enough time to get to camp before dark.
Centuries of gravel running through this wash have polished the spillover into a series of graceful grooves.
Wandering through the ancient gallery, it was hard - ok, impossible for me in particular - to resist admiring the figures and symbols we'd discovered on our previous visit. And the look I got from @mrs.turbodb - one of "of course you want to, and yes, I'll indulge you" - was entirely expected, when I suggested we climb up to see some of the best glyphs.
When visiting rock art and ruin sites, be respectful.
This is most easily done by following the Leave No Trace principles; leaving the place exactly as you found it and taking with you only photographs and memories. In case that is not clear enough for some reason, here are examples of respectful behaviors:
Snakes, water, and those "droplets" look an awful lot like some of the fertility symbols we've seen carved with more relief, elsewhere.
I really like the three spring symbols, as well as the corn/grass in this panel.
Just a guess, but the guy with glasses is ... probably something else.
I didn't notice this lizard the last time we were here. Maybe he's buddies with the rabbit we're after!
High panel.
Basket panel.
And then, as we wandered past a boulder we'd passed several times on our previous visit, we saw it. Pecked into the surface, the cutest little bunny petroglyph we've ever seen. Technically, the only bunny, for those counting.
Be vewy vewy quiet, I’m hunting wabbits. This was the most important archaeological find of the century.
And with that, it was time to find camp!
Assuming it wasn't too windy - not an entirely safe assumption given the weather guesser's forecast for the next 24 hours - we knew exactly where we wanted to camp. So, we pointed the Tacoma toward Gold Valley, where a saddle - usually with an amazing view of Telescope Peak - would be our home for the night.
Clouds and rain obscured the highest peak in the Park. An indicator of more to come.
Before the following morning...
As is usual for us, we ate an early dinner, dorked around backing up photos from the day, and squeezed in a few minutes of is-it-even-screen-time-if-there's-no-internet? , before brushing our teeth and climbing into bed sometime around 6:30pm. It was pitch black outside.
At 8:30pm, I was shaken from a contented sleep by @mrs.turbodb. "Someone's coming," she said, as high-powered off-road lights illuminated our camp. A minute or two later, a Jeep XJ went screaming by, the driver working the rev-limiter like it was a rental.
Weird.
Five minutes later, nine more Jeeps - of various body styles and vintages - rumbled by. That's a lot of Jeeps to be out "exploring" at night, and a lot more than the 4-vehicle maximum allowed in a group. Still, we've never run into any trouble on our adventures, and feel entirely comfortable in Death Valley, so a few minutes after watching them disappear into the night, we were both fast asleep again.
For about half an hour.
The whine of engines, honking of horns, and blaring of "someone get me a cold beer," over the CB radios roused us from our sleep. These guys had to see that we were camped only 50 feet from the road, but they still decided to stop and troubleshoot an electrical issue for 20 minutes - shouting over the engines they just had to keep running the entire time - before finally continuing back down into Greenwater Valley.
We'd find the entire group camped there in the morning, spread out across a beautiful stretch of desert pavement, leaving a trace. I complain a lot about UTVs (and their drivers), but I always acknowledge that they aren't the only problem. It's folks like this that make it so we can't have nice things, and ultimately get our favorite places closed.
The following morning...
The rain started just after we went to bed - ranged from light to heavy through most of the night - and was still falling when we awoke. The storm would bring more than 0.6 inches of rain in total to a place that usually sees less than 2 inches a year, closing several of the main roads as mountains vomited their insides down the alluvial fans.
Hoping it would stop at least long enough for us to get camp put away - even if we had to get the tent out later to dry it out - we read our Kindles for a while, enjoying our 14th hour of horizontalness.
A wet morning, with more on the way.
All around us, there was water in the air. The smell of a wet desert is wonderful.
Eventually, the rain did let up. Not long enough to dry out the tent, but long enough to whip up a quick bowl of cereal and assemble a couple of rotisserie chicken sandwiches so we could get a move on to our trailhead for the day: Funeral Peak.
Looks kinda boring if you ask me.
I have no real goal around peak bagging in Death Valley, but as we pretended the Tacoma was a PreRunner on our way back into Greenwater Valley, @mrs.turbodb decided to see what Digonnet had to say about the hike, and pulled up Hiking Death Valley on her Kindle. To her surprise, the hike wasn't listed at all. However, it did mention this (highlight mine) in the intro to the Black Mountains:
Home to world-famous Zabriskie Point and spectacular Dante's View, the Black Mountains border the dramatic southern basins of Death Valley, from Furnace Creek Wash to the Amargosa River delta. They are the second lowest in the park - their highest summit, Funeral Peak, is only 6,384 feet high.Hiking Death Valley
This got the wheels turning in my head. After the smoke cleared and smell dissipated, I realized that we might be on to something. Back in 2021, we'd ventured into the Owlshead Mountains and summited the Lowest Peak in the Park, before returning only a couple weeks later with a fun idea to reach the Highest Peak in the Park in the Panamints. Since then, I hadn't really given much thought to high points of the park's ranges, but on hearing that a spot we were planning to go was a third high point, I squirreled away the idea to try and bag them all. We'll see if anything ever comes of that.
For now, we had a 10-mile roundtrip - with no obvious trail to follow and intermittent rain showers - between us and sunset. A blessing, really, since this would have been an absolutely brutal hike in the blazing sun.
The first couple of miles - across the valley - were mostly boring as we wound our way amongst the creosote. It was, however, not too steep, and reasonably easy going. A great way to lull us into a false sense of success.
A brilliant aster of some sort. (left) | A single orange mallow. (right)
At mile marker 2.5, things changed. And quickly. We'd gain more than 3,000 feet in elevation on the day, nearly all of that coming in the final two miles of the hike. It was up. A lot of up.
Looking back at our first steep ascent.
Enormous veins of volcanic boulders acted as jumbled staircases.
We averaged just one mile per hour as we picked our way from one field of boulders to the next, doing our best to avoid the harder-to-navigate shrub-covered terrain as much as possible. Pauses - more to appease our legs than our lungs - were frequent.
Early on in our climb, we passed this cool old boundary marker.
Boundary marker: BDY DEVA 1079 F39. Thrilling stuff. Exactly what you hike up 3,000 feet to see.
This little hedgehog cactus was looking sharp.
As we continued to climb - through refreshing rain showers - the valley slowly dropped away below us, and the views opened up to the north, east, and south.
Greenwater Valley below.
Layers of blue.
When it wasn't raining, the moisture evaporating off the desert floor created an endless sea of ghostly ground fog.
Having started later than we planned due to the weather, it was a little before 1:00pm when we reached the summit. Here, we got our first cloudy views of the Death Valley salt pan to the west, and of Gold Valley and Smith Mountain to the south.
Black Mountains high point.
Stashed in a ziplock bag, itself tucked into a second ziplock bag that was stashed in a locking plastic tupperware, which was pulled out of a military grade locked ammo box - because nothing says ‘wilderness adventure’ like military‑grade food storage - @mrs.turbodb eventually found herself thumbing through the summit log.
As she did, I wandered around to find the survey marker that would indicate our achievement. Unfortunately, I'd make two disappointing discoveries in the process.
There were only about a dozen entries since 2019. Understandable given the slog to get here!
Of the survey markers that once decorated the summit of Funeral Peak, only the "No 2" locating marker still remains (left). The other locating marker (top right) as well as the summit marker itself (bottom right) have been stolen by hiking hoodlums.
Seriously people, why?
Hungry, we settled down to consume the last of our rotisserie chicken sandwiches, chips, and an apple. These sandwiches turned out to be a great variation to our usual deli meat options, with the rotisserie chicken having so much more flavor and (probably) less processing. Or, at least, the meat came from identifiable chicken pieces, rather than a big round ball of smushed-together-before-being-lemon-peppered-turkey.
Eat your heart out Foresty Forest.
And then, it was time to head back to the Tacoma. In fact, we could see it from the summit - a tiny dot below a reddish rise, on the opposite side of the valley - and surely it would have been nice for our knees to have climbed this peak when it was covered in enough snow to slide down.
It snows a lot in Death Valley, right?
If only we could pinch and zoom our way back to the tiny truck in the distance.
The final push.
And with that, our first trip of the fall was in the books. With a flight out of Las Vegas in five hours, we tucked ourselves into the cab - our knees and feet rejoicing - and headed east. We'd stop a couple of times when we hit pavement to air up and dry out the tent - which we'd put away wet in the morning and didn't want to mildew in storage - before picking up a quick bite at In-N-Out and hopping on our flight home.
The next trip is already scheduled. Oh, how wonderful it will be to return.
Rock Art of Funeral Peak
Though there may have only been a dozen or so entries in the summit log since 2019, Funeral Peak and the Greenwater Valley have been a special place for centuries. Long before Europeans, Native Americans called this place home, and there are several locations where their presence continues to this day. Here were a few of the petroglyphs we saw along the way.
Herd of sheep.
Lost sheep.
Lots of combs.
Skinny dude.
They found the wagon wheel I was looking for a couple days earlier!
Scissors for shearing the sheep? (No, that's an atlatl.)
Dancing banana 
anthropomorph.
The Whole Story
