Our last trip to Death Valley - our first time exploring the Backside of the Black Mountains - I mentioned that every time I visit my favorite National Park, I always seemed to come away with a longer list of places to see after the trip, 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 explore than the entire original trip. So much for this being an "uninteresting" part of the park.
I contemplated bailing on the Grand Goal and If You Look Long Enough, trips in spring to try and wrap up my satisfy my Black Mountain curiosity - and surely, finish, once and for all, 
, my exploration of this range - but with the same thing likely to happen again, I realized that a little variety in the terrain would be nice, so I saved the places I'd discovered for my first trip of the fall. It would be a doozy, with four hikes in three days:
- Returning to Buckhorn Wash to hike an "awesome hidden mine" that I'd found mentioned in a cabin log.
- Wandering up a remote canyon to the ▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮▮ Mine, where an ore cart lay - waiting to be rolled by yours truly - in an unassuming adit.
- Retracing my steps - third time's a charm - to find a wascally wabbit carved into stone.
- Summiting Funeral Peak, enjoying a bit of rock art along the way.
A Rusty Pick, Wagon Wheel, and a Mine of Wonder | Blacks #1 - 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…
Tucked Away in an Adit | Blacks #2 - 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…
Becoming Baggers - Summiting Funeral Peak | Blacks #3 - 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…