Long time no write, where have you been?
Oh wait – that was me.
MIA in Death Valley – ha
Nice to see you on the other side (Hello there – beaming smile).
What have you missed? What happened in that Valley of Heat and below sea level desert valleys? Famous for their high temperatures and extreme landscapes.
I will tell ya – lets get to it.
We woke up early, after the great burro boot caper was foiled (forever vigilant, I swear). Packed up our shoes, Kyle put our tent away (a release thingy here, a push down doo-dad there, click click and done, loving it). We were off, to Henderson Nevada, a city outside of Las Vegas. We are stopping there to pick up our newly Amazon ordered 5 lb. Propane tank, top off our groceries and pop by Camperland RV Store to obtain a food safe water fill hose (because garden hose water doesn’t taste as refreshing as you remember from when you were a kid and hot in the summer running around the backyard – plastic and rubber – not so yum).
We arrive at the Amazon lockbox – getting very excited to try this out, as we have seen people use them on YouTube, and heard how easy – but it is our first time, so we are going to figure it out.
Drive to the Safeway, with the lock-box outside- no email with zippy unlock code. Hmmmmm
Double check email – yup confirmed delivered yesterday. (We have 72 hours to pick up before instant return – we are 30 hours in – not the issue). Check email again – nothing. Check Amazon Account – nothing. Okay – we decide to go to Camperland and do that errand first. Get the water hose, dump our super plastic tasting water and Camperland is so awesome – they let us fill our sweet little 10 gallon tank onsite (big shout out to Camperland RV Store, Henderson – you guys are doing it right in all the best ways). We grab a bite of lunch – found a Mexican food place near the Amazon box and thought Tacos. Now we are fed and watered (HA- see what I did there – ba doomp chink). Back to Safeway for a hopeful drop box update. Shop at Safeway, grab the essentials (aka. Gluten Free Oreo’s – I mean we bought more but who cares if you have those delightful Oreo’s).
Still no delivery – and now the account says – package delayed.Well humph – we are on a schedule here; we have places to see, roads to drive and things to tourist the heck out of. It is 3 in the afternoon and we got there at 8 am – we can wait no more. Abandon our hope for our little propane buddy and off towards Death Valley we go.
Zip along – through the desert and over some mountains, we are cruising down into Death Valley talking of all the trails we will take now we are set-up for the portions of the park we couldn’t do before. This is a return trip as we visited last year in early February. We check in at the Furnace Creek Visitors Center, talk to the ranger on duty and get road/trail conditions – all green for go – along with the warnings – have lots of water, make sure you have enough petrol ( I have the humor of a 12 year old boy so if you say Gas I giggle because – well toots- hahahahahaha).
We have decided to stay the night outside of the park, just outside the town of Beatty, NV close to the historic site of Rhyolite. We find our spot while the sun is setting and get ourselves situated under the cover of night and blanketed in stars (not too shabby for day 3 of our new life). Tomorrow we will enter back into the park via Titus Canyon. Morning arrives and we are go to use our newly tasty water from our tank and grum bum, no water will come out?
What??? It was working yesterday – click click
Check the fuse thing, the pump – is it getting juice? Yup
Is water leaking inside and not making into the hose? Nope
Oh man – we are going to be rolling around backcountry roads in Death Valley and we have no onboard water?
Okay, we can do this, we were going to start the day topping off our petrol in Beatty, grab Kyle a soda and begin. We will just grab some water bottles and a gallon jug or two and we can figure out our pump issue later, nothing we can do on the side of a mountain. Off to Beatty and then to explore Rhyolite Ghost Town along with some very cool art installations. (I could go all travel agent here and give you all kinds of history and information, but there are tons of people who have written, blogged and explored all of this in-depth than anything that I could provide, so we will stick with the highlights. Ready – cool art – Ghost Town – look at the pictures we took – ewwww – ahhhh).
Now off to Titus Canyon for Closed Mines, dirt roads and some switchbacks up and then down mountains. We check the weather one last time before we head out of service range and find we are due for a huge wind storm for the next 4 days within Death Valley. Roof top tent, gale force winds- blowing dust and no terrain for wind breaks – okay – what do we do?
I look online (good old google to the rescue again), find that Mesquite Campground within Death Valley has some cover and is a 1st come 1st served campground. If we make it there, we can hopefully ride out the night with some protection, and potable water to refill – praise the Lord.
Plan in place we are finally on our way to Titus Canyon. This Canyon is a 4×4 rated gravel road that traverses steep inclines up a mountain side, switchback curves decent into a canyon and when you are all done, you find yourself emerging from steep Rock walls into a overlook of Death Valley. Truly beautiful and here are just a few pictures.
Oh they have old abandoned mines, lots of interesting history about the area – some of which is a bit scandalous. Involving fraud, a mining town that didn’t last 2 years and a railroad built to sell shares to unassuming investors taken for a very expensive lunch and pocket money fleecing.
Once we emerged on the other side of Titus Canyon, we revel in the expanse of Death Valley and the variation of the terrain laying before our eyes.
To Mesquite Campground for, fingers crossed a spot to sleep. This campground is tucked into a little wash basin that in good times has access to some water – hence the small vegetation that we are hoping will provide some relief against the oncoming wind storm. We find a spot and tuck in. Close to the rest rooms and luck has it – upwind – which unless you didn’t know – matters a lot. (We found that out the hard way this one time in Sedona – ahh perfume a la outhouse). We had a lovely sunset and are counting our blessings as we revisit our 4 day itinerary for the rest of our time here. What we were going to do in 2 nights 3 days will now be a truncated version, drop a trail and hit: Eureka Sand Dunes, up Dedeckera Canyon, up Steel Pass rolling into Saline Hot Springs, out Saline Valley Road to Lone Pine, California. We calculate our petrol and the mileage like – 5 times and we can do it all in a day but we have to make it out to Lone Pine for camping otherwise we will be sleeping in storm winds rolling sand everywhere. I am thinking maybe we could stop in Saline Hot Springs, but Kyle isn’t so sure he is up for naked people in Hot Springs. Such a gentleman my man.
Sunrise finds us after a very windy night a-top our Jeep. But we didn’t blow away nor did we have any tent failures, we were safe and sound (loud gusty sounds, but sound).
Top off our water stores and trash in the dumpster – we are off. Let’s off-road this park. Two days of trail in one day – here we come.