While it may seem that most of my trips are well-planned months in advance, the reality is that I usually only have general sense of where I'm going - Death Valley or Utah or Canada or whatever - until two weeks before I leave, at which point I'm frantically looking for something to do that will be amazingly cool. Luckily, there seems to be no end of amazingly cool things in nature, so I'm usually OK.
This time, it was a Thursday when I suggested to @mrs.turbodb, "We aren't doing anything next week. Want to go to Death Valley for a couple days?"
She said no. Very unapologetically in fact. She was going (cross country) skiing.
Only slightly deterred, I decided I'd still give it a go. I had a few places I wanted to visit in the Funeral Mountains, and with a couple days I assumed I could knock them all off the list. I was wrong, as usual. But I still had a lot of fun!
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After getting dropped at the airport 90 minutes before my flight, I worked my way toward the TSA Precheck security checkpoint, hoping the line wouldn't be excruciatingly long. When I first got Precheck a decade ago for work, I primarily got it to skip all the security lines, but these days it seems like everyone has Precheck, just so they don't have to take their shoes off. Luckily, it must have been the lull after the Christmas rush, and I walked right up to the TSA agent with no line at all!
Flew on another cool Alaska Airlines plane. This one is the "Honoring Those Who Serve" aircraft.
It was nearly 9:38pm when I landed and got into the Tacoma, and that meant a mad dash to pick up a few provisions at the grocery store before racing over to In-N-Out before they both closed at 10:00pm. Luckily, I made it to both, because it would have sucked to miss out on eating for the next 48 hours.
I pulled into camp - along Hole in the Wall road - just after 1:00am.
No need for a headlamp with a half-moon illuminating the landscape.
The following morning...
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?.
I'm sure that strange mistakes on a map aren't all that uncommon in the grand scheme of things. After all, maps contain a lot of data and are - in many cases - somewhat arbitrary. I'm not talking about flat earth-style mistakes; though, riddle me this: if the earth is round, why are maps flat? 
Rather, I'm referring to geographic or manmade features that are misplaced in relation to where they actually exist on the surface of the earth.
While I'm sure there are more, I know of two of these misplaced features in Death Valley National Park. I've previously visited one - The Marble Tub - and today I'd planned to find the second: The Red Amphitheater.
Good morning sun.
Except for a distinct lack of stars - or even a single extremely bright star - my campsite didn't look much different in the daylight than it had at night.
While a reasonable person may have decided that a 2:00am bedtime should suggest a slightly later start to the morning, I fall squarely outside the realm of reason. With a trip that would last less than 21 daylight hours in the park, I wasted no time in climbing down the ladder to eat a quick breakfast, before gathering up my maps and camera equipment and heading off into the trailless desert.
If the labels on my maps were to be believed, I arrived at the Red Amphitheater approximately five minutes after leaving camp. As we've established, the maps are wrong, and I quickly confirmed that this place was distinctly not red; nor was it an amphitheater.
The Yellowy-Gray Drainage™.
Feeling smug - knowing that I was one of the few people stubborn enough to question decades of mapmakers - I soldiered on in the direction that I expected to find the real Red Amphitheater. Even under cloudy skies - or perhaps glad for them and the cooler temperatures they afforded - I enjoyed my return to the desert and every step along the way.
Rounding a bend in the wash, a striped Schwaub Peak dominated the horizon.
Boulder field.
Volcanic narrows.
Picking my way from one drainage to another, my path wound its way between weathered walls and up a couple of short dry falls as I gained elevation. I'd end up gaining about 800 feet on my way to The Red Amphitheater, but it was all gradual, until I arrived in the fiery bowl.
A little red up ahead!
I'm sure the first thing I noticed when I arrived was the amphitheater itself, but I was quickly distracted by a pair of undulating rocks laying along the side of the wash. Had these specimens been sandstone, I'd have determined the surface to be fossilized ripples, but that couldn't be the case here; this rock was - at one time - quite obviously molten lava.
Despite the similar appearance, this would not make a very comfortable mattress topper.
It turned out that these undulating surfaces were quite common throughout the Red Amphitheater, with layer upon layer of lava displaying similar characteristics. I have no idea what causes this, and rather than using one of the new artificial hallucinators to figure it out, I'd love it if someone could just tell me. Or not; I probably won't remember in a month anyhow.
After admiring the rocks - which sounds strange to say, but is a big part of any desert adventure - I knew I had to get up and out of the wash if I was going to stand any chance at capturing the curvature of the blazing red bowl that should have been obvious to anyone labeling a map of the Earth's features.
Eyeing a little ridgeline on the far side of the wash, I picked my way up a steep slope.
As I reached the ridge, I got a nice view down-canyon to some unnamed peaks.
Turning around, my first instinct was the most obvious: "Echo!" Echo! Echo! Echo!
There'd be a lot of up-and-down on my visit to the Red Amphitheater, because after climbing up for a view from the far side of the wash, I knew I'd never really forgive myself if I didn't climb up to the big reddish-orange wall that comprised the upper level of the amphitheater. Plus, I could only imagine that ancient humans must have felt the same way, and how cool would it be if I found some sign of their existence up there?
So, I quickly relinquished all the elevation I'd gained and started up the even steeper ramp that seemed like the easiest route to the red. This was further than it looked, but I was still fresh, so it only seemed mildly miserable.
Even under cloudy skies, the glow was glorious.
If the rocks in the wash were cool, up here they were completely out of this world. Weird stuff was happening inside the Earth when some of this stuff was created, and I found myself audibly muttering about each increasingly spectacular find. I am easily impressed, I suppose.
This sponge rock as not spongy at all.
Rocks in the rock!
Monkey bread? Or Croquembouche? We'll just call it “Monkey‑bouche.”
Rock rainbow.
Popcorn ceiling.
Having worked my way from one end of the amphitheater to the other, it was eventually time for me to find a way down. I considered retracing my steps, but everything seemed to be "mostly straight down," so I just hoped for the best as I carefully stumbled my way from one loose footing to the next. Dislodging a few rocks along the way, I chased them down the steep slope to the relative safety of the wash. From there, a quick glance at my pocket watch - I'd already consumed nearly 10% of all the daylight hours I'd have in the Park - sent me double-timing it back to the Tacoma, and racing down the road past Hole in the Wall.
Of course, there, I had to take a few minutes to capture the grandeur.
The power of water.
Compressing the background.
The view to the backside of Artists Pallet was reasonably striking as well, and before long I was out of the truck again, hoofing it to the top of a local ridge in order to get a slightly less obstructed view.
When a Death Valley mountain range can't decide what color to wear.
My day was far from over, but my first outing was in the books. I knew that the next - as worked my way through a popular, nearby canyon - would carry me through the remainder of the day. I'd been to Echo Canyon before, but only to see the most obvious treasures it contained. This time - I hoped - would reveal a whole lot more.
One more thing...
While out on my first hike, I was lucky enough to run into some rock art. In a place the size of Death Valley National Park, there's plenty to be found, but most of it is reasonably difficult to discover given the size of the haystack. Still, pictograph sites are always a little rarer, and it was nice to find this site in the Funeral Mountains!
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:
I'd seen a shot of this triangular outcropping in my research, so I knew I was getting close!
Pigment paradise.
Monkey bar man.
Lines.
More lines, in more colors.
Ceiling art. Most of the pictographs here were red, so I really liked the white anthropomorph and atlatl.
The Whole Story
That photo with the turquoise, yellow, gold, and other colors reminds me of when we visited Jawbone Canyon last year. Some ways in there is a similar colored landscape, very colorful.