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 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!
In Search of a Red Amphitheater | Funerals #1 - 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…
Secrets of Echo Canyon | Funerals #2 - 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?" -…
A Cold Morning on Chloride Cliffs | Funerals #3 - 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…
The Canyon of King Midas | Funerals #4 - 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 Gold 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…
A Death Valley Spring | Funerals #5 - 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…