10,000 ft - day 2
I requested a 7AM wakeup call for this morning, but as it turned out we were actually already in the car, on the road by 7AM, as David was awake just before 6AM. We both had a rough night. The bed was like a slab of concrete, so I never got comfortable, and David woke up frantically crying at 10:30PM that his legs hurt. After holding him, carrying him around, giving him water, and then snuggling with him in bed for almost a half hour, he calmed down, and drifted back to sleep. By morning he was fine, so my best guess is maybe his legs had fallen asleep and he had pins & needles during the night. Anyway, since we got up so early, we got a very good start to the day.
We made the hour drive out to the Ancient Bristlecone Forest, about 10 miles east of Bishop as the crow flies, but closer to 40 by car. The forest is about 10200ft up, and I could feel all the effects of the altitude. For starters, it was about 35F up there, and windy. On top of that, I had a fairly bad altitude headache that I never ended up shaking until I took some aspirin much later in the afternoon. David was mostly just a bit cold, although I suppose he might have been feeling other effects, and just didn't verbalize them. The views from up there were just amazing. We could basically see a 50 mile long swath of the Sierras, including the portion that contains the southern most permanent glaciers in North America. We ended up walking a trail that was a mile long (the other two trails near the visitor center were 2 & 4 miles long). This 1 mile trail was almost entirely straight up the side of a mountain, so it wasn't easy by any means. It was worth it because the views were once again gorgeous, and we saw a really nice sampling of bristlecone pine trees (which are the oldest living things on Earth, with some of them over 5000 years old). David kept exclaiming that he saw a pine cone, but hey, if he's excited about finding pine cones in a pine forest, I'm not going to ruin that for him.
Once we got done with the hike, we went back to the car to warm up & get a small snack. As I was pulling out of the parking lot, I was debating whether or not to continue north on the road (which turned from paved to gravel & dirt) another 12 miles to another larger grove of bristlecone pines, or head back to US-395. Since it was still quite cold, and the drive up and back was listed as taking about 2 hours, I decided against it, and as things turned out, that was a very wise decision. Just after I had pulled out of the parking lot back on the road, a light on my dashboard came on warning that my "tire air pressure is too low!". Urmm, what? So I pulled over immediately, and visually inspected all the tires, and none of them looked to be significantly low. At the same time, i had no clue what was wrong, and I was about 35 miles from the nearest gas-station. I ended up trying to convince myself that it was some malfunction due to the altitude, and that it would go away once I was back on the main highway. Of course it didn't go away, and at that point, I just tried to convince myself that I'd find a gas-station, add air to all 4 tires, and it would be fine. The problem with this plan was that the air pumps that I found at the gas-stations were funky, and I couldn't get a good seal on the air spigget for the tire, so I ended up letting out my air rather than forcing it in. At that point, I knew that I was completely screwed, so I managed to find a gas-station with a mechanic (instead of the ever present quickie mart stations that are basically everywhere these days), and he was able to help me immediately. He pulled out a better air hose, and checked & filled air into all 4 of my tires on the spot, and the warning light finally went off. Andre from the 76 station in Big Pine, you are my hero of the day! Of course, there's still the lingering worry over what caused my tire(s) to loose air in the first place, and will it happen again, but for the time being all is well.
After that we continued driving south on US-395 for another 40 minutes until we got to the Manzanar Japanese Internment Camp historical site. This was one of the infamous Japanese internment camps during world war 2. Today, there's little left other than 1 guard tower, the entrance guard shack, and the cemetary. The remainder are just plots of land with signs in front noting what that area was used for during the internment, and is accessible via an auto tour around the property. There is also a large museum/visitor center, which presented the history of the site extremely well. David was a bit impatient in the museum, but he was fine for the auto tour. We got out of the car at cemetary, and looked around a bit.
Following this stop, we made the 105 mile drive to Death Valley. This drive was alot of fun, and I'm saying that without sarcasm. The roads were fairly empty, and the desert scenery was beautiful. Our first stop was just west of Stove Pipe Wells Village, where we explored Mosaic Canyon. This is a slot canyon which has walls that are lined with marble. It started off with the walls fairly far apart, with alot of random (to me at least) rocks & gravel everywhere, but after the first few hundred feet, the canyon narrows considerably, and the amount of very smooth marble increases quickly. We saw some kind of random lizard (about 3 inches long) darting along the canyon, and David was very excited. There were a few spots where there were steep or uneven cliffs of one to 3 feet tall, where I had to lift David up to continue. We ended up stopping (the canyon runs a few miles, and I doubt we went more than 1) at the point where the canyon makes a hard left turn, which creates a perfect area for echos. David was so excited by the ability to make every minor sound, echo. Although he was also somewhat confused because at first he thought it was a gecko that was making the noises, not an echo, and even after I explained the difference to him, he insisted that he was going to find the echo, as if it was a physical manifestation. We only passed two guys hiking back together on the way up, and there were two couples that we passed on the way back, but beyond that the canyon was completely ours. One thing I should note is that the 2.4 mile long dirt & gravel road out to the canyon from CA-190 is fairly washboarded & pot-holed, and was not the least bit fun to drive on. Oddly, the drive back on it felt smoother, perhaps because it was downhill so I was coasting at around 30MPH much of the way back, where I was struggling to maintain 20MPH going up there. The temperature was about 93F when we did the hike, but it didn't feel too bad.
Afterwards, we stopped off at the motel (Stove Pipe Wells Village) and got the room key, but couldn't go into the room because it wasn't clean yet. One very annoying thing that I found out is that none of the restaurants in DV opened for dinner until 6:30PM. In my opinion, that is ridiculously late, and basically forced us to find things to do for another 3 hours. I decided that we'd drive another 23 miles to Furnace Creek to pick up a park map at the visitor center. On the drive out we past the massive sand dunes, and I pointed them out to David. He was very excited and was asking me every 10 minutes when we were going to go see them. While there, we sat through the 12 minute long park slide show, which I thought was a decent introduction to the vast & varied features of the park. We also walked through the museum for a little bit, but David really needs to improve his museum behavior considerably. He was either too loud, or too impatient, or too grabby. Following the visitor center, we drove just next door to Furnace Creek village, where I checked out the paltry offerings in the general store, and then reviewed the restaurant menu. After all of this we had killed close to an hour, and drove back to the motel. After running through the standard car unpacking, room exploration routine, I decided that we'd eat dinner back in furnace creek, and stop off at the sand dunes before dinner to capture the best light from the setting sun (it sets at about 7PM).
We headed out at 5:45PM, and hiked out to the sand dunes. David had an incredible time. He started off just running his fingers through the sand, and making footprints, but after a while, he was on his hands & knees digging, drawing letters, numbers, smiley faces, and a bunch of other bizarre stuff, and just running up & down sand dunes. The light was perfect. The sun was fairly low in the sky, so I got some amazing shadows off the assorted formations of the dunes. We both had lots of fun, and probably hiked at least a mile out into the dunes. Following this, we continued driving to Furnace Creek, and ended up eating at the steak house there. The prices are ridiculously overinflated, and they have the audacity to tack on a 15% gratuity to everyone's meal, which is insulting to say the least, however that's the policy at all the restaurants in DV, so its really inescapable unless you're willing to drive 30-45 minutes out of the park to eat elsewhere. I will admit that the food was pretty decent, and the service was good too. David was very well behaved at dinner, and ate all of his food voraciously (as always). By the time we got out of there, it was dark outside, and we drove all the way back in the dark, with david actually commenting on the stars that he could see in the sky.
One thing that has kind of boggled my mind is the large number of European tourists that we've run into at Yosemite, Mono Lake & Death Valley. I thought that August was the big European holiday month, yet its wall to wall Germans (with a few French here & there) everywhere. I've got nothing against having them help subsidize our national park system, but its a bit disapointing that there aren't more Americans enjoying them. At dinner tonight, I don't think any of the tables around us were speaking English. And I've noticed that whenever there are signs in multiple languages, they seem to be in German. Anywhere else in California and the 2nd language is usually Spanish, but we all know that the Mexicans aren't coming to national parks, that's for sure. I've also heard stories about wacky German tourists who have taken there tiny rental cars onto "4x4 only" or "high clearance required" roads in death valley. Its just weird how English is the minority language here in our national parks.
All in all, it was another good day. Much more Death Valley fun (hopefully) for the next 2 days.