Sunrise on the Inyo. One of the things I'd really appreciated about my time with Matthew @Beardilocks was the speed at which we moved. It was slower. As someone who lives in his truck and spends several months a year in Death Valley, he's in no real rush. On the other hand, I always feel like I've only got a couple of days to squeeze in as much as I can. It was freeing to move at Matthew's pace, but hard habits die hard and given that I'd be hiking Saline Peak solo, I was - once again - up…
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It was a cold night camped above Steel Pass. At 5,000 feet, it was 31°F - about 10°F cooler than it'd been at our lower-elevation-camp the previous evening - just before sunrise. Luckily, my electric socks made going to bed easy, and two down comforters kept me nice and toasty until it was time to roll out of bed in the morning. I was relieved to see that I was Matthew @Beardilocks was still around; I hadn't scared him off on our first day together! Grabbing my down puffy from the cab and pulling my beanie down over my ears,…
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Five years ago now, I received an email that began thusly. Needless to say, I was intrigued. I just wanted to drop a quick line to say howdy. I only recently stumbled across your site and felt a bit of deja vu. I'm a photographer and I've spent the last 3-4yrs exploring the western side of North America in my 1998 Taco (with 400k miles on her!) and have been to a lot of the same amazing places you have. Luckily, you've been to a lot of places I haven't as well and given me some great inspiration. It seems…
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After a spectacular hike up King Midas Canyon, I'd planned to camp somewhere near the mouth of Monarch Wash - which I've visited the upper end of in the past - so I could hike to a mine accessible from the lower end of the drainage. However, as I was driving up the Beatty Cutoff, I started to have second thoughts. I knew I had to be out of the park and on my way back to Las Vegas no later than 9:30am. The hike - some 6 miles roundtrip, plus the inevitable stopping for pictures - would take me…
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Of all the hikes I'd planned for the few hours I'd be in the Funeral Mountains, my anticipation was highest for my journey to the King Midas gold mine. There isn't anything particularly special about the King Midas mine itself. It's not a very large mine. There aren't many artifacts left to investigate. Getting there is nearly impossible. Rather, it was the hike - climbing just more than 1,700 feet of elevation in a smidge over two miles - that had me excited to go. And I was excited about the hike mostly due to the King Midas being in…
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I inched toward the edge of the cliff under cover of darkness. My super-bright, bumper-mounted Diode Dynamics SS5 lights cut multi-mile-long daggers into the abyss over Death Valley. Anyone glancing my direction - from Badwater Basin to Ubehebe Crater and everywhere in between - would be justified in wondering, "What is up there?" It was the perfect edge-of-Chloride Cliff camp. Soon the tent was deployed, and I found myself standing on the edge of the same cliff, shoveling spoonfuls of Wheat Chex into my mouth. Below, tiny white lights followed a consistent route along the valley floor. Furnace Creek and…
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Echo Canyon is not one of Death Valley National Park's lesser-known places. Quite the opposite. Its main route is one of the most heavily traveled dirt roads in the park and - unlike all but a few of the most popular canyons - campers must reserve a numbered camp site in order to spend the night. But I wasn't headed to the usual spots in Echo Canyon - at least, not entirely. Sure, I'd pass a couple of them along my route - watching as the folks already there wondered, "Where's that guy going, he didn't even slow down?" -…
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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…
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On our way to the Mule Tail Mine after hiking Upper Marble Canyon. Pastel skies - and Telescope Peak in the distance - as we searched for somewhere level. After a bit of a struggle to find a reasonably flat spot along the Mule Tail Mine road where we could set up camp, it was pitch dark when we climbed into the tent a little after 6:15pm. We were asleep 45 minutes later, well before a reasonable bedtime. It was also windier this evening than it'd been on the previous three that we'd been in Death Valley National Park. Rather…
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After a long day hiking Lemoigne Canyon, it might seem that we'd be glad that the next trailhead was less than 12 miles away. Unfortunately - despite all the birdseed I've fed the green machine over the years - the Tacoma has yet to grow wings. Forced to use the Death Valley road system - up and over Towne Pass and through Panamint Valley along CA-190, out Saline Valley Road to Hunter Mountain Road, and a few more miles toward Goldbelt Spring - it would take us the better part of three hours to reach camp, high in the Cottonwood…
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Only a few minutes after reaching the end of the old road that leads up Lemoigne Canyon, we headed to bed. The weather overnight - with temps in the mid-50s °F and a very light breeze - couldn't have been more ideal. Sleep came quickly after our not-for-the-faint-of-heart trek up Pyramid Peak, and we heard Michael @Mr E30 and Stacy just as our alarm roused us the following morning. First look at our surroundings. Morning rays on an unnamed peak in the southern Cottonwood Mountains. This canyon is named after Jean Lemoigne, a French prospector from the early mining days…
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The last quarter of 2025 has not been kind to Death Valley National Park. Major flooding occurred on September 19th, wiping out many roads that'd only recently reopened after hurricane Hillary went through in 2023. The September rains couldn't have happened at a worse time. The NPS - already historically underfunded in my opinion - had been gutted by asinine firings and government cutbacks. Budgets for managing and maintaining our National Treasures had been reduced dramatically. This resulted in cleanups that took longer than ever, a situation that was further exacerbated by a government shutdown - over the availability of…
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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…
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Having averaged our usual 1mph - which includes all the time we're stopped for me to take photos and stumble around underground - on our hike in Buckwheat Wash, we had a few hours of daylight remaining when we got back to the Tacoma. That'd be enough to get us to the starting point for our next hike - and hopefully to get dinner made - just before the sun set for the evening. I'd planned to take pavement nearly to the trailhead in the southern end of Death Valley, but when we passed Furnace Creek Wash Rd - which…
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Last spring, on our final trip to Death Valley - and our first time exploring the Backside of the Black Mountains - I mentioned that after every visit to my favorite National Park, I always seem to come away with a longer list of places to see than I had going in. Of course, it happened again. After wandering around the Black Mountains for three full days - which included driving every road in the entire area - and before I'd even posted my stories of the adventure, I knew of several more places that I would take longer to…
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I have no real goal around peak bagging in Death Valley, but something fun just happened, and so now I'm keeping a list. Maybe someday it will become the basis for more. While @mrs.turbodb and I were enjoying our first Fall 2025 trip to Death Valley, I shared with her that we'd be climbing Funeral Peak on the last day of our adventure. Keen to see what Digonnet had to say about the hike, she pulled up Hiking Death Valley on her Kindle and was surprised to find that the hike wasn't listed at all. However, it did mention (highlight…
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Morning along Pine Creek. A quarter mile from the Pine Creek Tungsten Mine, I remained fantastically horizontal for 12 hours while my body recovered from the ordeal of the previous day. As I climbed out of the tent to start my new day, I decided that perhaps I'd overdone things a smidge, and that I should take this as a rest day. Twenty minutes later, I found myself a mile down the road - enjoying a big bowl of Wheat Chex - just outside the Pine Creek Pack Station, as the thump-thump-thump of a helicopter grew louder overhead. Initially unsure…
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For the second time in as many trips, I'd been abandoned. This time, a trip to the Arizona Strip and North Rim of the Grand Canyon was on the books until life got in the way for a few buddies, and as they bowed out, so did @mrs.turbodb. This left me in a bit of a pickle, as I'd left the Tacoma in California at the end of my previous outing, and still needed to ferry it down to Las Vegas for the winter. So, it was back to the computer and a bit of time sorting through the many-lifetime's-worth…
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This is a special place to my Dad, one that he's been visiting for more than 30 years. As such, I've used names we've given to local landmarks or redacted the names of places that might be too revealing. If you recognize any of the places shown in the photos, please help to keep them special by not mentioning their names or locations. For the last eight years, I've spent a few days to a week with my Dad at his favorite camp site in the Sierra National Forest. We didn't think this year would be any different as we…
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Just out of the park. Setup on an old mining road just east of Furnace Creek, our flight home was a little later than usual, so we planned to get a hike in before heading back to Las Vegas. This meant a third morning in a row of awake-before-sunrise, but with early sunsets and bedtimes around 7:30pm, we were still getting more sleep we generally get at home! It'd been a windy night, but our spot - between a hillside and a road berm - had been chosen carefully to reduce wind noise on the tent, and as we shoveled…
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