Death Valley is assuredly a place that is impossible to imagine without having experienced in your own skin. An early settler is quoted as describing it as “20 miles from water, 30 miles from wood, 40 feet from Hell.” Even with today’s 1,000 spot RV campground, gas stations and radiator water spiggots, one does not have to travel far off the pavement to ponder their survival readiness. With a 4×4 vehicle you can go further on dirt and jeep trails than any National Park has ever let me. If you’re ready for hard washboard road or some rock crawling you can find massive sand dunes, abandoned mines encampments, trailer communites surrounding far flung hot springs or dry lakebeds with rocks that move across them. Even in the paved parklands you can see geological wonders of global singularity, casually walk where pioneers abandoned slower compadres, and have a cocktail sunset viewing the whole valley from porch of the Furnace Creek Inn, but just miles down almost any unpaved road you’ll find a museum of amazement and wonder unlike anything at the Park’s Information Center

Driving into the park, over one of the quickest 3,000 elevation rise of any road I know in California and entering Death Valley proper from the west over the severe and frightenly dry Panamint Range I can now only think of the early emigrants with gold on their mind. Wagon train folk that by this point had burned their wagons for warmth and killed and dryed their oxen for sustenance dragged themselves over what they prayed were the Sierras only to see Mt. Whitney and the other 14k giants more than 2 full ranges away. How they must have burned with fear of the perils of this planet and perhaps lives after this. And yet with nothing more than food, extra water and a 2 gallaon jerry can on the roof we rolled in barely more prepared than the endless stream of day trippers and 40′ RVs coming from all over the West and South West.

There are three options for overnighting in Death Valley. The first is stay in one of the handful of accommodations, the best being the Furnance Creek Inn (aka Hotel California) which I certainly look forward to enjoying on a future visits. Second is to camp or RV with massive bulk facilities - the main site has over 1,000 spots alone - though there a handful of campsites with 5-25 sites, most on dirt roads. The third and our highly preferred option is to drive out on the miles of dirt and 4×4 roads into the forever emptiness of the valley and camp wherever you chose to stop the vehicle. Most National Parks forbid any sort of informal camping for fear of being overrun by car campers. Death Valley offers miles of incredible free and permit-free camping. Besides your vehcile, what you hauled in and the road you drive in on you’ll see exactly what you would have 5,000 - if not 50,000 - years ago.

Our second night we camped after a 3 mile drive up a rough wagon road up a steep alluvial slope on the eastern side up to Scotty’s Canyon. (The unmarked entrance is directly across from the Ashford Mill ruins off Highway 178.) We feasted on a thanksgiving meal 2,000 above the valley floor, the odd set of headlights being the only reminder of which eon we were in. The next morning we hiked up to the abandoned Ashford Mine just 3 miles further up a tight series of canyons up dry canyon river floor. We used rusting cans and wooden splinters as guide to direct us to the 4 precarious shacks and 1 very deep and open mine shaft. Abandoned gas refrigerators and stoves from the 40s indicate as recenly as the 1940s miners dreamed of finding what had alluded most every propector in the valley since the first nuggets were found around the time of the Sierra gold rush. (I’ll skip giving detailed directions to the mine, so email ted at this domain if you want to find it for your self.)

That evening we crossed back to the wedtern side of the valley and camped around 4,000 feet in the Panamints, a dry steep range. What must be a lovely break from the 100+ degree temps on the valley floor in the summer, the site was still nice and mild even on November 25th. The next morning we woke and drove 25 miles further, 15 on dirt up to 8100 feet, the highest roaded point in the park, to the trailhead to the trail to the 11,040′ Telescope Peak. From the first steps the eastern views deep into Nevada are stunning. You can see the entire salt floor of the valley right down to Badwater 280 feet below sea level. From here it is slightly more obvious that Death Valley is not a valley (i.e. a water-formed sluce) but rather a graben (a “a down-dropped block of the earth’s crust resulting from extension, or pulling, of the crust”), a graben that is filled with 8,000′ of sediment before bedrock is found! The trail to the peak is an amazingly gentle path 7 mile path that cris crosses ridgelines meaning there are also exceptional views west of the Eastern Sierras. Mt Whitney and the other 14,000 monsters piece upwards just as the salt pinnacles 2+ miles down below in the Devil’s Golf Course. While RVers ran the AC 11,300 below at Badwater, we we really missing having hats, gloves and winter coat. From the peak there was absolutely nothing to block winds coming from deep off the pacific, and not much land mass to heat it.

After returning back to the car at 4pm (this was the Saturday of Thanksgiving Weekend) we thought we were going to cleverly sidestep Sunday I-5 traffic by getting a head start and camping in the the Easter Sierras, one of my favorite places to be in California. Ignorantly, based upon a sense of over confidence, we hadn’t even considered the weather or asked to find out that heavy storms had already closed Tioga and Sonora passes, our most obvious routes home. We actually had to be instructured by a “that must be broken” bank sign that told us it was 33 degrees. The one in the next town said 32. Now we were fine and safe and could have stayed at one of many hotel rooms, but that simply seemed too foreign after sleeping deep up in the hills without even putting up tents. Fortunately Monitor Pass was open (the last pass short of going to Reno) so we carefully and slowly drove through over 3 8,000′ foot passes on Highway 89 & 88 - all dark, lonely and slick. While such a drive seems ever so prosaic when doing a straight run to the mountains, after 3 hard days camping, a long 8 hour hike in the 50s, and 6 hours of driving time under the belt, we felt just a tiny bit closer to the California emigrants of the 1800’s, where your good situaiton could become very bad in the passing of a dark cloud.

But with our combustion engine, 24 hour gas stations, pave highways and an endless supply of convenince story coffee and red bull we returned to San Francisco 10 hours after we completed our 8 hour hike. And imagine that we had a whole bonus Sunday to enjoy in ’sco, without having to sit in a minute of holiday traffic