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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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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Feeling vindicated after our second visit to Water Canyon and the White Domes, it was time to see some pictographs! They weren't far away - in fact, we'd already passed the trail system that would lead us to them a couple times - in our attempt to re-order elements of the trip due to weather- over the last 24 hours. Still, with only 90 minutes of daylight left - and no sense of the road conditions - there was a good chance we'd be finding camp and making the short trek to the rock art in the morning. Hell Dive…
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It's rare that I'm at a loss for where to go, but in trying to figure out a plan for an early-October trip, I found myself casting around a bit. It's not that I don't have places I want to visit - in fact, I've been itching to get back to Death Valley, longing to spend more time up in British Columbia, and curious to see if I can find more Grand Canyon Polychrome out on the Esplanade. But - as I looked at these places, and trips I already have mapped out for each of them - none of…
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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. It is not often that I get to visit Dad's special little spot in the Sierra twice in one year, and I suppose that technically this year is no different, since we were foiled in our first…
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After grabbing lunch in Eagle, we hopped on the freeway - a slightly embarrassing experience, given that we were aired down and travelling rather slowly - for the six-mile stint back to Gypsum and the start of Stage 5. In fact, we'd be splitting off from the main route, which follows the highway for a stretch, opting instead to run the 15-mile "Harder Alternate," rejoining the main route at the Colorado Canyon Gorge. "No Jimmy, the fish wasn't 'this big,' it was only four fingers long." Gypsum, keeping it real. Stage 5 - Gypsum to Steamboat Springs North of Gypsum…
Continue readingGypsum to Steamboat Springs and WY - Pavement and Private Land | COBDR Stage 5 and 6
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Having finally reached the summit of Mt. Antero - a place so accessible and yet not included on the Colorado Backcountry Discovery Route (BDR) - we were headed into Buena Vista just before 11:00am in search of something to eat. We'd learned our lesson the previous morning - having arrived in Lake City before the traditional lunch hour, opting to skip lunch, and later regretting it - and @mrs.turbodb was working the airwaves to find a good spot to stop for lunch. Half a day later - having added a highlight that every BDR adventurer should enjoy as part of…
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One of the things we've learned about running a Backcountry Discovery Route (BDR) is that trying to time a stage to a day - where the day ends at the designated end (and thus beginning) of a stage - is a bad idea, at least when you're trying to camp. This is obvious once it's realized, and it makes total sense for the dual-sport bikes that BDRs are designed for, since they often use towns as places to find a roof for the night, but for a truck - where the sleeping arrangements are in the bed - it's better…
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We headed out of Telluride just after 1:00pm, and I was worried. We'd finished the entire first stage of the Colorado Backcountry Discovery Route (COBDR) in half a day, and I knew that if we didn't slow down a bit, we'd find ourselves all the way through Stage 2 - and the Alpine Loop - before sunset. And that would be terrible, because I already knew where I wanted to camp for the night, and it wasn't past the Alpine Loop. In fact, it was only about halfway through! Luckily, speed is something I could control. Well, that and we could…
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One of the very first trips we took was to run the original Oregon Backcountry Discovery Route (BDR) in July 2017. In fact, we attempted a segment of the route in May on our way home from a trip to Oregon's Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, but lingering snow and dozens of down trees made progress painfully slow. We enjoyed it so much that every year since, we've picked another BDR to tick off the list. This year, Colorado is the name of the game, and it's one I've been looking forward to for quite some time. The route begins at…
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