Jacques and Natalie go to Death Valley.
We leave Santa Cruz around 5pm and we have to go through a lot of the evening commute traffic before making good headway. We stop in King City for a byte to eat at a local diner. Our last stop is just short of Bakersfield at Shafter, and we camp there for the night. The former KOA campground is almost deserted which is understandable since Bakersfield in November (or at any time) doesn't strike me as a hot camping destination. We turn off the lights around 11pm.
Natalie is tired and wants to sleep late, so I compromise, get up at 8:30, and go for a hot shower while she stays buried in her sleeping bag. I did get milk, but forgot to bring cereals, so she gets to go to the camping store, and picks some of the small boxes of sugary cereals that she likes so much. I get my usual bagel and cream cheese plus some yogurt, and we make tea in the hot pot. We leave around 10:30am. It is pretty balmy by then with a fair amount of fliers which get inside the car and are eventually either squashed or released in Death Valley.
We drive the usual way first to Bakersfield, then on Hwy 58 through Tehachapi. It is foggy by then, and the windmills appear all at once beating their arms through the fog. At Mojave, we turn north on Hwy 14. We pass by Red Rock State Park, but because it is daylight (we often get there when it is dark), I get to see its bright colors much more vividly than I ever remember seeing them. Natalie doesn't see much of it because she is engrossed in a game of Frozen Bubbles. It would be fun to stop there for several days and really explore it.
Then we do more driving on to Ridgecrest where we gas up and stop at the local supermarket to get the supplies we forgot, and lunch at the Deli counter. We go quickly through Trona (a small one industry town with its peculiar smell surrounded by beds of evaporites), and Natalie starts writing a short story about peculiar happenings at a school around Trona; she has a great imagination.
The road out of Trona is one of my favorites. The road is first wedged in a small valley filled with peculiar boulders, then it climbs back up, and at the top you are suddenly viewing the entire Panamint Valley in one fell swoop: it is spectacular. We see a fair amount of jeeps going by which are part of the Panamint Valley Days (PVD) crowd: we can see hundreds of campers and dust rising in the foothills on the west side of the valley.
Because we left late we decide to skip our usual entrance through Wildrose and Emigrant canyon, and instead take Hwy 190 in. We get to Stovepipe Wells around 4pm, but because the 49ers group also meet in the Valley during the Veterans day weekend, the motel campground (which has hookups) is full, so we go to the National Park campground next to it which is basically a gravel parking lot crammed with RVs side by side. We play cards in the van while eating cheesecake, the dessert we picked up in Ridgecrest (no dinner because we are both still full from the late lunch). I then go to the pool, plug in the computer to write this, and listen to the band (sponsored by the 49ers), while Natalie does some reading and works on her math homework. On the way back, I admire the night sky; I am glad we have the binoculars with us to check if I can see the Andromeda galaxy, and sure enough the hazy patch of galactic matter is there just a few stars away from the big square of Pegasus. The Pleiades are also a good sight to see, and the Milky Way is very visible from one end of the sky to the other. It is the best night sky I've seen in several years, and it isn't that cold!
Natalie wants to sleep late again, so I let her sleep until 10 o'clock. I read V for Vendetta during that time. I take some photos of the big RVs leaving the campground, and by the time Natalie is up and about, most of them are gone. We leave around 11:30, stop first at the motel desk to see if any camping sites has opened up, and we are able to grab one. Next stop is the ranger station to pick up a permit to visit the park; I get a year long one since I'll be visiting Zion and Bryce at the very least, and we can use it next year when we come back since it is good until the end of November.
Then on to Golden Canyon. We pack a lunch and water, and make our way slowly up the canyon. We decide to do the loop from the guidebook, but end up doing it in reverse order from what we have planned because we do not find the start of the trail. So we go up Golden canyon first which is shining with bright golden hues in the sunlight. Half way there we get passed by a troop of boys scouts dressed in blue T-shirts (we call them the blue meanies, not that they've done anything bad). The last stretch is a hard slog up and up toward Manly Beacon before dropping down to the wash which is visible from Zabriskie Point (and we see that the boy scouts have made it). We go back down Gower Gulch, and have our lunch. We notice lots of borax mine openings, and eventually as the canyon gets narrower, we have to scramble down a series of small dry falls. At the very end of the canyon, we find ourselves at the top of an unclimbable dry fall, but we notice a path that circles it to the right: we do not have to backtrack! The last portion is just a long hike following the base of the mountain range back to the parking lot just below Golden Canyon. There is a strong headwind.
The sky gets cloudy in the west, and the setting sun peeks through some small cloud openings above Telescope peak, then it sets behind the mountain range. Natalie calls her Mom (miracle: we're within cell range of Furnace Creek), then we drive back to Stovepipe Wells. I see what looks like a bank of fog in the valley, but it is actually dust kicked up by the wind. The van is buffeted when we cross over to the other side of the valley. It is still very windy when we set up camp. We have some chicken fajitas in the van, before going to the pool for a shower and coming back with some dessert from the general store.
We get up earlier than usual (8:30am) because this is our last day in Death Valley. Natalie goes to take a shower while I prepare the van for the trip to Las Vegas. By 10:30, we are at the mouth of Mosaic canyon, one of our perennial favorites. I computed that we have to leave by 1pm, so we make it only to the first dry fall before turning back. This is the first time we hike the canyon in the morning, and some parts of it are still in the shade. We act as guides to some other folks which are here for the first time. It's nice when you start to know something so well that you can predict what's around the next corner. It feels very comforting and reassuring that things are occasionally constant in life; although in this case, I'm well aware that a flash flood can rearrange the landscape in a jiffy.
When done hiking, we stop one last time in Stovepipe Wells for gas and Natalie buys souvenirs for some of her friends. Then we start the 3 hour drive through Beatty to reach Las Vegas. After a missed turn for the airport (bad signs), I ask for directions, and we arrive there with time to kill. Their short term parking requires a lot of quarters (25c/10 min). We eat a bad dinner at Sbarro Pizza, then we wait for the flight which is announced half an hour late. I wait until Natalie's flight leaves the gate, then I leave the airport.
I park at a Von's on Tropicana to get some supplies, and discover that I have wireless access through the University of Nevada. I am able to check my mail for the first time. Rats! The token problem on the new www2 server seems to have stopped healing itself. I restart both bigsis and httpd, and send out a bigsis test status message which seems to restart the server just fine: what's going on? I'll check more carefully next time I have a connection.
At this time, I need to find a place to park for the night. The guidebook suggests that Sam's casino has a RV park which is away from the strip. I locate it by using maps from a Home for Sale brochure, but the camping office is closed. I finally find a working electrical plug, and I try to beat Natalie's Frozen Bubbles score. I can't, and since it is way late, I turn in.
Continued in Southern Utah.