Sauerkraut Trail | Butte-iful #6

Having had a wonderful three days in Butte Valley and the Panamint Mountains, our flight out of Las Vegas wasn't until 8:00pm, which afforded us an unusual opportunity: a leisurely morning in camp and plenty of time to work our way east.

Knowing this, we'd also planned to take care of a few items we'd deferred on the last several trips -  washing the Tacoma, vacuuming the interior of the cab, unloading all of the recycling that'd been piling up in the Trasharoo since December - all things that needed doing, but "eventually."

Anyway, things were going to plan as we were airing up in Panamint Valley a little after 9:00am. We were enjoying the warm morning sun, reading the historical signs for Ballarat and the Briggs Mine, and hoping that one of the jets - only specs they were so high - would race down below the hard deck and give us a nice roar.

And then, somewhere between airing up the third tire and watching a fighter jet refuse to descend below 60,000 feet to entertain us, my brain did the thing it always does. The thing where "we have ten hours to make a four-hour drive" stops meaning "great, we can take it easy" and starts meaning "we can fit two more hikes, three historical markers, and a petroglyph site nobody's heard of before we go."

Shockingly, @mrs.turbodb - who has known me long enough to know my disorder well - agreed!

In my never-ending quest to see that which Death Valley has to offer, what I've done most effectively is create a list of things to see - some of which I know the locations of, and some of which I do not - that is growing at a rate faster than I am seeing them. I'd recently gotten wind of where we could find one of the more elusive spots, and soon our brains were smoking away as we tried to balance driving distances, hiking distances, fuel levels, and time.

In the end, we decided that we'd give it a shot. The trail - according to the trip reports we'd found, and the hope-this-is-it route I'd sketched out on the GPS - was between 1 and 1.75 miles in length. We'd have right around 4 hours to get it done; totally reasonable if all our data was correct.

Our data was not correct.

And so, pushing the Tacoma to speeds it rarely sees - especially in Death Valley National Park - we raced toward the trailhead. It would take us more than an hour to get there - and cost us all of the extra fuel we had in the tank - but the reward would be worth it; we were sure. Soon enough, laden with water and smothered in sunscreen, we were off.

The trail we were after is known - by a very few number of people - as the Sauerkraut Trail. No one seems sure where the name comes from, but I've found references as early as 1954, so it's maintained its barely-known status the better part of a century. Often these places are named for the Europeans who used them while prospecting, but mining is unlikely the case here; the route shows no indication of heavy usage, nor is there an endless trail of rusty metal that seems to follow miners around.

Still, the route would have been a virtual thoroughfare for native peoples traveling between lower and higher elevations as the seasons changed in the desert, and this repeated tamping down of the terrain is still quite apparent along sections that haven't been subjected to major water events.

Knowing that we only had four hours before we had to be back at the Tacoma, we were kicking along at a good clip as we crossed the alluvial fan in search of the petroglyph-covered rocks that are the highlight of this excursion. We found nothing for the first mile, our heads on a swivel. Then two.

Were we even in the right place? At the very least, it was yet another example of my distance estimates being wildly inaccurate. Perhaps to be expected as our searches lead us to lesser and lesser-known places, but still disconcerting, especially when we were "on the clock."

And yet, this had to be the place. There were cairns. Tons of them.

I was fighting a battle with myself the whole way up the trail about the cairns. Are they ancient? Most are quite small. Too small to have survived standing for thousands of years. And I’ve only ever seen very larger cairns attributed to Native American. Of course that could just be survivor bias, where virtually all of the smaller cairns have been wiped out over the centuries.Pockets Full of Dust

And then, we saw it.

Not far from the trail - a few paces at most - was a deeply-varnished stone, covered in petroglyphs.

Whether it was actually the first of the series or not, we were thrilled. It also sent my anxiety level through the roof. Even with four hours, I'd been wondering if we'd have enough time to find the majority of the rocks along a 1.75-mile section of trail; now that we'd ticked off a good chunk of those minutes just getting there - and would need to tick them off again on the way back - how in the world were we going to see everything?

Rush more faster, that's how.

What followed was not an extension of the easy, relaxing morning that had started our day. Instead, a rather frantic hunt ensued, both of our heads on swivels, scanning the sides of the trail for candidate rocks.

Ultimately, all the petroglyphs - that we found, which I suppose limits the sample in a rather biased way - seemed to be carved on rocks no further than 10-20 feet from the trail. And they were done where-ever the rocks sat; there’s no evidence that rocks were moved closer to - or even rotated to face - the path of travel.

Maintaining the trail - or more frequently, finding it anew as it crossed massive washes - consumed precious minutes that we didn't have, and surely, we could have continued our search longer than this particular afternoon allowed. In the end, we covered a little more than a mile - glyphs sprinkled like Easter eggs along the side of the trail - before we turned around to tackle the return route.

Unsurprisingly, with only a few stops for oh-we-missed-that-one-on-the-way-here stones, we made better time on our return trip than we had on the way out. This is reasonably normal once trail finding is no longer as much of an issue, though I worried that our hurried pace initially might have meant that our return trip would consume just as much time.

In the end, we probably could have spent another half hour or so wandering the desert than we did, but getting back to the Tacoma - and ultimately onto our plane - at a more manageable pace was worth the peace of mind. With a quick stop at the car wash, and a dinner of Zupas for the lady + In-N-Out for me, we lifted into the air as the light faded from the sky.

Until fall, Death Valley. We will miss you.

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