Today we headed out not quite bright and early enough for Jim to visit the Racetrack. (We picked up my parents at 8:15. He would have preferred 7, but he is accommodating.) It’s a long drive (an hour or so) from Furnace Creek to the turnoff to the Racetrack. Then you travel 29 miles of high clearance dirt road to actually get there.
An enterprising company has started renting Jeeps in Death Valley, and we saw them all day on this trip. Probably 75% of the cars we encountered were rental Jeeps. I have to admit I have mixed feelings about this: While I think it’s great more people can see the backroads of Death Valley, it means there are more people when we go there! I try to rise above it.
The Racetrack is a dry lake bed, or playa. Even without mysterious moving rocks, it would be a special place, with its dramatic cracked clay surface surrounded by rock cliffs, and an island (the Grandstand) rising from the middle. But the trails of rocks, moved by a still unknown mechanism, make it enchanted.
We saw great rock tracks, of rocks of different sizes, and strangely crossing paths. Unfortunately, unlike our last trip here in 2002, it did seem that humans had been messing with some of the rocks – either removing them from their trails, or dragging them through the playa to make new tracks. These tracks look very different than the smooth ones naturally created. But it made me sad, and a bit mad, that people would be such jerks. I blamed the rental Jeeps, just a little, for this phenomenon.
We headed out and up a short road the Ubehebe mine. It’s a great old mine site with an aerial tram, a short rail line for loading oar cars, and as David said, the requisite old wood burning stove. We ate our boxed lunches from Furnace Creek Inn and counted mines in the hillside.
