On our first trip to Death Valley, I created a route that I was pretty sure covered almost everything we'd ever want to see. In three days. It didn't take long - maybe only three or four more trips - for me to realize that I'd never see everything I wanted to see in this magical place. With distances so vast that it can require more than a day just to traverse the length of the park, I quickly realized that any given trip should revolve around a small region of this desert wonderland.
And so, that's what we've mostly done for the last few years.
But as always seems to be the case, there are always things that get discovered later, things that there just weren't time for, and reasons to go back to the places we've already been.
This time, we'd try to tick a few of those off the list. In addition to nabbing two more Death Valley high points, the perfect weather would give us the opportunity to seek out some little-known rock art and enjoy the long-abandoned equipment at some seldom-visited mines as we explored our way through Three Ranges in Three Days.
Driving the Impassable Road to Grapevine Peak | Three in Three #1 - In planning our hike up Grapevine Peak, I'd learned, somewhere, that there was a VW-bug-sized boulder blocking the road somewhere between 6,900 and 7,400 feet above sea level. In an attempt to determine its position, I'd further discovered that the NPS had designated the last three miles of Phinney Canyon Road as impassable. If that was true, the rock would be the least of our concern, and I hoped NPS was being overly cautious; that the impassable moniker was in the eye of the beholder. Our plane landed in Las Vegas at 8:00pm, and even with a quick dinner and…
Abandoned at the Blue Bell Mine | Three in Three #2 - Our arrival along the crest of the Panamint Range coincided with the setting of the sun - something that's happening earlier and earlier, it seems - so we quickly deployed the tent and set about assembly of our taco-rritoes and guacamole. As usual, these hit the spot, and we were lucky enough to follow them up with a couple slices of lemon cake that @mrs.turbodb had picked up at the store when we'd provisioned upon our arrival in Las Vegas. Then, knowing we had an early morning and full day ahead of us, we climbed up the ladder for a…
Emigrant Wash Petroglyphs | Three in Three #3 - While we were in the Panamint Mountains, I realized that we should make a quick stop at a once-well-known petroglyph site in Emigrant Wash. I'd gotten wind of this site years earlier, but our adventures - since I've always got us rushing from one spot to the next - never really lined up to check them out. Today, with plenty of time, was the perfect opportunity to spend a few minutes admiring the ancient art. The best museums are open air. Knowing generally where the glyphs were, reaching them required only a bit of how-do-we-get-over-there, and after a few minutes…
Jayhawker Canyon | Three in Three #4 - Death Valley has a long history of mining, but long before people traveled to this vast swath of desert in search of shiny metal, they travelled through it in search of the same. Some of those people were the Jayhawkers. When gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill in 1848, thousands of hopeful prospectors headed west to California. Among them were the '49ers, many of whom traveled by wagon through Salt Lake City before crossing the Great Basin and Sierra Nevada. By October 1849, however, winter was approaching, and the Sierra Nevada passes were becoming dangerous. Remembering the disastrous fate of…
Through a Joshua Tree Forest | Three in Three #5 - Having wrapped up our time in the Panamints - the second Death Valley mountain range we'd visited on this trip - it was time to head toward the third. We wouldn't have time to work our way into its folds until the following morning, but with two more hikes planned, we knew we needed to position ourselves strategically before the sun dropped below the horizon. I have no idea why people think stickers are any different than graffiti or litter. It took us a while to find camp. The wind had picked up significantly, and if there's one thing that's…
Straight Up. Galena BM | Three in Three #6 - After a very enjoyable morning hike, we were back in the Tacoma for the final time. This time, we were headed into the Nelson Range to tick off its high point - Galena BM - in my quest to visit the high points of each of the major ranges in and immediately around Death Valley. Galena BM wouldn't be the highest of the points, and with the track I'd created being only 0.7 miles long, it wasn't going to be one of the longer hikes, either. It was, however, going to be steep. That less-than-three-quarters-of-a-mile entailed 1,350 feet of elevation…
I've been making yearly (and sometimes two) trips to DV for the past 24 years. Like you, there's still so much more to see! Maybe we'll bump into each other some day.
Would be super cool to run into you sometime!