Here is a video of my last match.  I forgot to turn on the camera for the first stage and dropped the camera in the second.  This was the first time with the GoPro Hero Hat-Cam at a match.  There was a lot to think about in addition to the shooting and I made a couple of procedural errors and shot some of the targets in the wrong order.  Those are going to kill my score.

2529.4 miles
18.9 mpg
56 Hours and 26 Minutes total driving time
8110 +/- 40 feet Max Altitude
-339 +/- 40 feet Min Altitude

A nice picnic area with snakes

A beer after a 10 hour drive. Beer is good.

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.

We were wrong.

After walking up the wash to the narrow entrance of the canyon, Jim pointed back at the path behind him, “Be careful there.”
“Where?”
“That bit there.”

That bit there was a narrow rock ledge that required a bit of a long step on slick rock. All that lay below was a cliff of more slick, and jagged rock, about 20 feet high.

“Oh no,” I said. “I am NOT going on that ride.”

My lizard brain fear of falling had taken over, and just as I didn’t climb a certain fence in 1987 to go midnight swimming with my friends, I could not imagine myself in any way crossing that gap.

Jim, being wise to my lizard brain workings, acknowledged that it was very scary, that I in no way had to do it, and then proceeded to park himself on the other side until I’d worked up the gumption to do it anyway. There are so many reasons I love that man.

The next couple miles were uneventful, with fun, not terrifying scrambling up a few short dry waterfalls. Our GPS started to indicate we should be near the turn to Golden Canyon, and we were looking forward to walking down for a change. (Remember, all hikes in Death Valley start up hill.)

We finally saw a sign that indicated a path to Golden Canyon, and saw hikers walking down the wash. Cheerfully, we turned and headed up a new gully. It was pretty, and I was content to keep climbing given its charms. Jim, however, having a sense of direction, said, “Something isn’t right.”

And so, we turned back. Returning to where we’d seen the hikers, we turned up a more gentle wash. A few hundred feet later we looked up and realized there were people looking down on us from Zabriskie Point. Really? This can’t be right either, even I could realize that!

I was starting to accept the new reality that we couldn’t find the proper path to Golden Canyon and I was going to have to cross that benighted ledge again. We returned to the sign, and, thankfully, Jim realized that it was pointing, not up either wash that the hikers we’d seen must have been coming from, but up a dry ridgeback behind the sign, a totally different trail.

We headed up that third trail with some relief. The relief was a little short lived when we learned that the next mile or so of our lives would consist of hiking up and down narrow dirt ridgebacks. It was stunning scenery however, and I was proud that my training of climbing the three steepest hills in my neighborhood paid off. I could make it up all the hills without stopping.

After navigating the ridgebacks, we came across ANOTHER sign giving us the choice to either go to Gower Gulch or Golden Canyon. The path we’d just finished, we learned, was the path to Zabriskie Point. We’d apparently missed the normal turnoff for the mellow loop we’d planned. Instead of our planned four mile hike, we ended up at 6.4. But it was gorgeous scenery, the clouds cooperated by keeping it coolish, and we were glad we went.

We barely got back in time for a celebratory ice cream and shower before meeting my parents for lunch. After lunch we headed out a mild 4WD road to see Hole in the Wall, and the Red Ampitheater. After a nap, we rounded out the day with drinks and dinner at Furnace Creek Inn.

After 10 miles we see the sign, reset the trip meter and turn west up the alluvial fan.  The road is rough with baseball to softball size rocks only they’re jagged instead of round.  We climbed.  We climbed almost 6 miles at a whopping 10 mph.   At  6 miles there was supposed to be an abandoned burro corral but we didn’t see any evidence of the ruins.

One other change came at 6 miles.  The road went from rough to now-you-need-4-wheel-drive-rough.  We have a Jeep, this is why we bought a Jeep so onward we pressed.   We got some desert pinstripe from the mesquite bushes, Nadya had to direct us around rocks a couple times, and the road got rough.

The view into the canyon is compelling and drew us further, that and the promise of an oasis.  We kept going until we indeed found the promised oasis.  A lovely spot for a picnic.  So nice someone had made a permanent stove out of  an old steel barrel.  If there is one thing we’ve learned on this trip, it is that anything can be made out of a steel barrel. At the Inyo Mine we saw one of the buildings had a heater stove made of a steel drum.

There’s a small stream running through the oasis, and we heard frogs. It’s a bit strange hearing a frog in the desert! We also saw three quail as we were driving down the hill, just a short distance from the stream. When we mentioned this to a park ranger, she was very excited as no one had reported quail in the park this year yet.

A nice picnic lunch, a little walk about and back in the Jeep for the drive down the hill.  The Jeep has a hill decent mode that almost drives you down the hill.  At one point we drove down the hill with no feet on the pedals and no hands on the wheel.   (Open Course, Non-profesional driver, Not Recommended for anyone pregnant or under the age of 18, Close cover before striking).

It sounds like a short trip, but it was the better part of the day – it took over two hours to get from the oasis back to the West Side Road. We call this quality time. We stopped periodically so Jim could rest (because you really have to focus for this kind of driving, hill descent or no!), and to admire the view and let the view admire us.

After washing off several layers of sunscreen, Nadya enjoyed a dip in the warm spring fed pool and we watched the league of old golfers. There’s a group of old guys here playing golf; they congregate on a patio near our room and whoop it up, trash talking each other and worrying about baseball scores. They’re having a grand time, and so are we.

We quickly made coffee, threw on clothes and headed for the Mesquite Dunes. We were so excited that we forgot the coffee in our room and didn’t even care. (Note to selves: next trip bring an electric kettle and French Press. Hotel coffee. Blech.)

We got to the dunes a bit after the sunrise, and the overcast day wasn’t providing the dramatic shadows Jim had been hoping for. But we had a grand workout hiking over the dunes, admiring the dried clay formations that looked the skeletons of crashed alien spaceships and trying to blow up people with our minds. (Said people were walking their dogs on the dunes, which is a spontaneous combustion offense in the National Park System.)

Nadya’s biggest thrill was recognizing the track of a snake in the dune – the slither of a snake with periodic diamonds where it had rested its head. Jim’s biggest thrill was waiting to see if Nadya would slide butt first down a dune. She didn’t.

After the dunes we stopped for breakfast at the Ranch and then headed out to Echo Canyon. After a false start, we found the road, which starts as a high-clearance 2WD and ends with a 4WD section. We were excited to be able to go off-roading since our last trip here was in a rental car.

Echo Canyon is a pretty canyon, that then leads up to the Inyo mine site. There are several places in the canyon that close into maybe 20 feet across.  We passed the Eye of the Needle and some really cool rocks that looked like a face.

The Inyo mine was worked until 1940, and there were buildings and old equipment to investigate. Then we drove to the end of the road and took a short (1 mile round trip) hike further into the canyon.

Driving back we were almost to the dramatic Eye of the Needle formation when Jim yelled, “Deer! Deer! Sheep! Sheep!” Or perhaps, “Dear! Dear! Sheep! Sheep!” and up on the canyon wall was a female Big Horned Sheep. She stopped to watch us and kept looking back over her shoulder. Following her line of sight, I saw a a young sheep feeding along the side of the road, just around the curve about 50 feet ahead of us.

We stopped to take pictures and had plenty of time, as the female wasn’t taking her eyes off of us, and the baby was more interested in lunch than anything else, though it would stop to stare at us between bites. Eventually the young one joined its mother up the cliff and after a brief laydown, the two bounded up the cliff together.

Back at the ranger station we filled out an official animal sighting card documenting our encounter with the Big Horn sheep for all eternity, or for whatever they do with the sighting cards.

We saw Big Horn Sheep when we went to Titus Canyon in 2002 with our old Jeep, so we’re feeling very fond of Jeeps right now. We rounded out the day with dinner at the steakhouse here at the ranch, and called it a lovely day.

Since breakfast easily doubled as lunch, the better part of the day was on the road, through Nevada, past Mono Lake and then another pass and long drive down into the valley. It’s always exciting to be below sea level.

We’re staying at Furnace Creek Ranch for the first time; the last two times we were here we stayed at the ritzier Inn. The room is fine, and looks out onto the golf course and the very corner of the stables. We can hear horses whinny, and that and the nightly bat sightings make Nadya happy.