Category: Death Valley October 2019

For Sunday afternoon, October 27, JoAnn, who had been on the road for weeks or maybe even months or years, wanted to go home, and none of the rest of us wanted to venture into the sand-blown maelstrom on the floor of Death Valley, so we piled into Red Sonja (Sandie’s Subaru Outback) and drove south to Shoshone, a hamlet just east of Death Valley which claims a population of 31, a grocery store, gas station and museum, a wetland in the middle of the desert, and, of all things, a hobbit ghost town.

Our first stop was the Shoshone Wetland, a haven for fish (!) and migratory birds in the middle of a desperately dry and dusty desert.

The wetland is hidden out of sight in an area which is also the site of an RV park and a school; you reach it via an access road which takes off from the side of the highway near the Charles Brown General Store.

As you venture into the wetland, the path widens and is kept cool and shady by overhanging vegetation.

Reeds, palms, willows and other oasis vegetation populate the desert wetland biosphere.

Eventually you reach a lovely shaded pool, complete with table, a perfect spot for a picnic.

Jock loved exploring the wetland paths, and being on a leash didn’t cramp his style at all. He just draged us along wherever he wanted to go.

Growing by the waterside was an old gnarled willow tree, which reminded me of Old Man Willow in the Lord of the Rings, who lurked along the Withywindle in the Old Forest, waiting for unsuspecting hobbits to come by.

The Shoshone Wetland is a sanctuary for desert pupfish, of which it claims to have its own species. Here Diana, Sandie and Kelly contemplate a pool full of them.

Pupfish are quite small and not easy to see even in a clear pool. At least they don’t have to worry about fishermen, since they are far too small for people to eat.

Next to the pool was a placard telling us all we needed to know about the Shoshone Pupfish.

On the opposite (south) side of town we found another distinguishing attraction of Shoshone – a series of little dwellings, dug into the side of rocky hills. There were two sets of them, one on either side of a broad wash; the places on the south side, dug into the side of a low mesa-like outcrop, were more numerous – there were five or six of them, while there were only one or two on the north side – it was hard to tell whether there were two separate dwellings or just one with two doors. To me it seemed as if a small tribe of hobbits had somehow made their way to the Mojave Desert, and carved out hobbit-holes here, perhaps later abandoning them (for they were vacant) when the Big People invaded the area.

In keeping with the hobbit theme, I named the north set Bagshot Row.

The south side, although it was completely detached from the north, I decided it was one house with two doors, and named it named Bag End.

Unfortunately, the desert version of Bag End was rather dilapidated and run-down. I decided that maybe Saruman/Sharkey had lived in it after being expelled from Middle-Earth.

This was the second trip to Death Valley that Sandie, Jock and myself have made together as well as in the company of our friends Mike, Diana and JoAnn, with JoAnn’s friend (and now ours, too) Kelly as a new and welcome addition for us. Like the first, the organizer and prime mover was JoAnn, who has been going to Death Valley for years and knows her way around it quite well. On this trip, as on the first one in November 2016, we stayed in the Atomic Inn in Beatty, Nevada. The Atomic Inn is a great place to stay for several reasons: it is affordable, its location provides quick access to Death Valley National Park, and little doggies are welcome there.

We arrived at the Atomic Inn the evening of Wednesday, October 23, and left the morning of Monday the 27th. Here are the links to the various excursions and events of our stay.

JoAnn had planned a hike at Keane Wonder Mine for Sunday morning, October 27, and a hike to Telegraph Canyon for Sunday afternoon, and Diana, Kelly and I had intended to keep her company; but Saturday night, a tremendous wind arose and blew all our plans into a cocked hat. Nevertheless, we decided to take a drive down toward the mine, if for no other reason than to see how bad things in Death Valley were.

To get to Keane Wonder Mine from Beatty, you take the Daylight Pass Road to Hell’s Gate, turn off at the Beatty Cutoff Road, and go another 4.7 miles to the Keane turnoff, which takes you onto a dirt road, on which you bump along for another 2.8 miles to the parking lot.

When we got to Hell’s Gate, it was obvious that the situation in Death Valley was not good. The floor of the Valley was obscured by an enormous dust cloud.

However, the dust cloud did not reach up to the Keane Wonder Mine turnoff, which is less than halfway to the Valley floor, so we persevered. And when we got to the turnoff, the dust cloud didn’t look any closer than it had from Hell’s Gate.

Once you get to the parking lot, you have to hike a short way uphill to reach the mine camp and mill area.

To be clear, the mine itself is at the top of the ridge, 1,500 feet up from the camp. An aerial tramway connects the camp to the mine. I wanted to take the tramway, but it turned out that it wasn’t operating that day.

Actually, the aerial tramway hasn’t operated since at least 1941. The alternative is to take a steep path up the hill, which climbs the 1,500 feet in 1.4 miles, and that was what JoAnn and Kelly proposed to do.

But in the end, we decided to leave that hike for another trip. The wind was blowing as hard as ever, and we weren’t sure that the dust storm wouldn’t blow up from the valley to engulf us before we could get up to the top and down again. So we settled for just checking out the camp and mill area, which was interesting enough.

There were signs posted along the trail to the mill area warning about mine hazards, contaminants, etc. and enjoining people not to enter or climb on mine structures. I couldn’t imagine why anyone would have thought they were necessary; everything seemed to be perfectly new, spiffy and in great working order.

Among the mine relics we saw was a huge cylindrical tank, which at first I mistook for a stranded WWI German U-boat. Lots of water was necessary to process the ore from the mine, and this tank was where it was stored. The tank seemed to be in surprisingly good shape considering it was abandoned at least 80 years ago.

Heading back toward the parking lot, I happened to notice this odd-looking hill off to the side of the path; it sported a rock formation which resembled a giant lizard climbing up the side of the hill. A real lizard that big would have been pretty scary.

Not wishing to have our windshields sandblasted, we avoided going down any further into the Valley, and instead headed back to Hell’s Gate and thence to Beatty.

It was a complete surprise to us.  Coincidentally, our sojourn in Beatty fell on the weekend of the major festival of the year – featuring a big parade, a carnival in the town center and various other events and attractions.  The parade began at 10 AM on Saturday the 26th, and that whole day we just stayed in town and enjoyed it all.

The flag-bearers were followed by various dignitaries – the Parade Marshal (a stuffed Winnie-the-Pooh bear), the festival and her court, the Nye County Sheriff in his latest high-powered police interceptor (a dune buggy), and the local justice of the peace in his Volkswagen minivan.

Then came a seemingly endless variety of floats and other entries. One of the first was devoted to the town’s ladies of the evening.

We had seen the Atomic Inn’s float – a flying saucer with aliens – under construction in the parking lot, so we knew what to expect. It was our favorite float, and it won the Grand Prize.

There was a wide variety of different kinds of entries – vintage cars and hot rods, motorcycles, motor-tricycles, bicycles, jeeps and other 4-WD vehicles, ATVs, trucks – it went on and on.

Also represented in the panoply of vehicle types were motor homes. In particular, the motor home pictured below aroused my curiosity. I think I’ve seen ones like this before, but I have no idea who made it and when. I suspect it’s from the ’60s or ’70s, but I haven’t a clue. If anyone knows about it, I’d appreciate hearing from them!

Not surprisingly, since it was late October, some of the entries had Halloween-related motifs, like the Catmobile pictured here, though ideally the cat should have been black.

It was a great day for viewing early Fords – Model Ts, Model As, Deuces and ’34s and so on.

Both original restorations and hot-rods were well represented. Among the latter was this ruby-red Model A crackerbox sedan, with a modern OHV V-8 under the hood.

And not to be left out, the epitome of the classic hot rod, a Deuce (1932 Ford) roadster, also sporting a modern V-8.

A gaggle of semis brought up the rear of the parade. Actually, they weren’t part of the parade; they were just the trucks that had been waiting until the parade was over to pass through Beatty – because the parade ran down the main highway (US 95), which had been closed for the event!

After the parade was over, everybody went over to the carnival, which was held on the Beatty village green. Among the attractions was an Old West mockup town where re-enactments of famous gunfights and other events were held.

The fair’s electric power requirements evidently exceeded the capabilities of the Beatty (population 1000), so diesel generators were brought in to augment the supply.

There were dozens of booths selling all kinds of wares – all kinds of food, of course; clothing, trinkets of various kinds, etc. There was a Hat Pavilion, where I bought myself a camo hat with a chin tie-string (which my regular Aussie leather hat doesn’t have) to keep it on my head when the wind is blowing. This turned out to be a very fortuitous purchase, in view of subsequent events.

Something I would never have expected was a tower for rock-climbers. After all, it’s not like there aren’t any good places for rock-climbing around Death Valley.

Beatty Days was scheduled to last three days, from Friday the 25th through Sunday the 27th. But on Saturday night a tremendous wind came up and blew away the whole shebang, putting a premature end to the celebration as well as whipping up a blinding dust storm on the floor of Death Valley.

For our second excursion with the Jeep, we set out for Chloride Cliffs, also known as Chloride City, an old mining district high in the Funeral Mountains.  It is reached by a 4WD road that leaves Daylight Pass Highway somewhere between Hell’s Gate and Beatty.  As in our morning excursion, we came to a fork in the road, but this time there was no sign to direct us and, instead of Chloride Cliffs, we ended up in Monarch Canyon.  But that was OK, because the distance to Chloride Cliffs was much longer, and we probably would have had to come back on that 4WD road in the dark.

Monarch Canyon is if anything more colorful than Marble Canyon – a geological potpourri with banded cliffs and multicolored rocks all round.

A little trail led us down deeper into the canyon, and we took it, not knowing how far we’d go or what to expect when we got down further into the canyon.

In addition to the colorful rocks, we encountered some interesting flora on the way, such as a tiny cactus nestling under a rock, with rose-colored needles all seeming to spring out from a hidden center.

Upon reaching the canyon floor, we found it to be covered with a dense thicket of reeds and long grass, fed by a small spring.

Proceeding further, we encountered an old stamp mill, designed to crush rock containing gold ore by pounding it, thereby preparing it for further processing. The ore is fed in via buckets carried down from the mineshaft on an aerial tramway.

By now it was getting late, and there didn’t seem to be much point in going any further, so we turned back at the stamp mill and wended our way back up to the parking lot. Again we had to plow our way through the little jungle of tall grass and reeds that constituted the quasi-wetland, no big deal, except that this time I seemed to have an allergic reaction to something in the vegetation and emerged sneezing and coughing. I quickly recovered, but I’m still wondering what it was in there that set me off.

Climbing back up the trail, I saw a splendid promontory jutting from the mountain above the parking lot with its upper half gleaming in the late afternoon sun while its lower depths were in shadow. It reminded me of Yosemite’s El Capitan, and of course I couldn’t resist getting a shot of it.

Back at the top of the trail, the Jeep was waiting to take us back to Farrabee’s, with Josie at the wheel.

On Friday the 25th, JoAnn, Kelly and I rented a 4-door Jeep Rubicon for the day.  Our first destination was Marble Canyon, which is reached by a road which begins at Stovepipe Wells and runs west toward the Cottonwood Mountains.  The first 8 miles is bumpy but navigable for any high-clearance vehicle, but after that you really want four-wheel drive.

After a few miles of bumping along over small boulders and through deep gravel pockets, we reached a fork in the road, and following the advice of Yogi Berra, we took it. The left fork goes to Cottonwood Canyon; we took the right, which continues to Marble Canyon.

Our Jeep Rubicon, with JoAnn (right) driving and Kelly riding shotgun.

At about the 8-mile point we passed through a gap in the hills and continued onto the rougher section of the road. Looking back at the western side of the hills through which we had passed, I noted that the cliffs were pock-marked with little holes, plus one big one, which to me looked a bit like a keyhole. I have no idea whether it leads to a cave, of if it already has a name, but I gave it one: Keyhole Kave.

Eventually we reached the Marble Canyon trailhead, where vehicular traffic ends and further progress has to be made on foot. We parked the Jeep and set forth on the Marble Canyon trail.

The Marble Canyon trail is part of a loop, known as the Cottonwood Marble Trail, 26 to 28 miles long; the other end of the loop is at the end of the fork in the road from Stovepipe Wells that we didn’t take, i.e. the Cottonwood Canyon road. The loop trail is classified as difficult, with a 3882-feet elevation gain, but the part we hiked on was pretty easy. If you want to backpack the whole trail, it takes two or three days.

Jo and Kelly only wanted to hike to a dry falls about 5 miles into the canyon, and I set forth with them, but after a mile or so, I realized that I wasn’t equipped for even that short a hike: I hadn’t worn my hiking boots and I hadn’t brought enough water. So I turned back while they continued on to the falls; and I meandered back to the Jeep, shooting pictures of the rocks along the way. The rocks in Marble Canyon are amazing.

The cliffs lining the sides of Marble Canyon consist of layers of rock tilted at a sharp angle to the horizontal, and in many places banded with alternating light and dark strata.

Interspersed with the banded layers were rocks with idiosyncratic features such as irregular “splotches” of white embedded in a matrix of completely different character.

There were also places where instead of splotches there were white streaks, as if the same vandal responsible for the splotches had brought a brush and a bucket of paint and started painting the rocks white before being caught and hustled off.

We also noticed a great many circular or oval “patches”, looking as if someone had drilled a hole in the rock and inserted a plug. These had many different colors and textures; some just consisted of different-colored rock, others looked as if they were surfaced with lichen or moss.

After arriving back at the parking lot, I took a nap in the Jeep while waiting for Jo and Kelly to return. Then we drove back to Stovepipe Wells, and, after a short sojourn, went on to our next destination, Monarch Canyon.

Mike wanted to test his Baja Bug on some of the unpaved roads in DVNP, and he got his chance the morning after we arrived, when we made an excursion through Titus Canyon. JoAnn and Diana rode in Boudicea (Jo’s truck), Kelly went with Mike in the Baja Bug, and Sandie and I took Red Sonja, our Subaru Outback, with Sandie driving and Jock, as usual, riding in the back seat.

The Titus Canyon road was considered an engineering marvel when it was originally built during the 1920s. It is a spectacular route, winding up through mountain passes to heights of over 5000 feet, then down through the rugged fastnesses of the Narrows to Death Valley. It is an unpaved road, rugged and bumpy but easily traversed by high-clearance two-wheel drive vehicles, though you might not want to drive your Corvette on it.

The Titus Canyon road takes off from Highway 374 about five miles east of Beatty, two miles west of the DVNP boundary. The first three miles or so are fairly level, though washboarded and rocky, and wide enough to turn around and go back if you get cold feet. But before long, the road climbs into the Grapevine Mountains and then descends through White Pass into Titanothere Canyon, the location of extensive fossil beds; the name commemorates a fossil rhinoceros-like animal whose remains were found here in 1933.

The high point of the drive is at Red Pass, where some of the most spectacular views are to be had.

From Red Pass we descended via a dizzying series of hairpin turns to the ghost town of Leadfield. The Titus Canyon road was originally built in 1926 to provide access to Leadfield, which was the offspring of a brief lead-mining boon in the 1920s, fueled by what might most kindly be characterized as highly optimistic promotions. The boom fizzled when no high-grade ore was found, and the town died in 1927. You can read the whole story at https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/deva/section4a8.htm .

We stopped for lunch at Leadfield, where you can see the remains of some of the mine structures, as well as tailings from the extraction operations.

Resuming our journey from Leadfield, we continued our descent toward Death Valley via a broad wash hemmed in on either side by towering cliffs, culminating in a relatively verdant spot known as Klare Springs. On previous trips, some of us had seen bighorn sheep, who come to drink at the springs, but on this trip none of us spotted any.

In the vicinity of Klare Springs are found some ancient Native American graffiti, more formally known as petroglyphs. At least that is what the sign tells us; for all I know, the scratchings on the rocks could have been left by modern-day passers-by. In fact, some of them were left by modern-day passers-by, who ignored the injunctions on the sign to refrain from defacing the irreplaceable Indian petroglyphs.

Now we reached the climax of the drive, the venture into the dreaded Narrows, a one-and-a-half mile stretch where the road shrinks to a narrow strip less than 20 feet wide in places, with overhanging cliffs hundreds of feet high which look as if a mild earthquake could send them crashing down on top of your car.

When we finally emerged from Titus Canyon, it was like a cork popping out of a bottle.

At the exit is found a sign barring entry, because Titus Canyon is a one-way east-to-west road.

Also at the exit from the Narrows is found a very welcome convenience – rest rooms.

In the evening, back in Beatty at the Atomic Inn, we put up tables and chairs outside our motel rooms and relaxed over noshes and beverages.

And Jock was very happy to hang out with his old friend Diana again.