death valley part 1 - day 3
This post is part 1 of the "dv-2006-09" series:
What a day we had. Thankfully the room was alot more comfortable than the previous night. I managed to get David to bed at a semi-reasonable hour, and we both slept fairly well. I actually woke up at 4:30AM, and tossed & turned for over an hour. Then at 6:15AM, David started mumbling, and that was about it for sleep. We were out the door before 8AM, made it down to Badwater just after 8AM.
When we arrived there was just one other car in the parking lot, and it was so early that the sun hadn't even climbed high enough into the sky to light up the entire badwater salt ponds near the parking lot. David was somewhat confused at first why there was so much salt everywhere, but after a while he was having loads of fun scratching at the salt on the ground, and tossing chunks of it here & there. We walked much further out than the last time we were here, and its really obvious how beaten down the salt gets closer to the lot once you're further out on the salt pan. I got some amazing pictures of the individual salt crystals, and David was loving the crunching sound of the salt under his feet.
Oh, and what a difference 3 years makes.
We then made the drive down to Ashford Mill ruins. There are basically two building frames left, and the outlines of a third building in the ground. David was somewhat amazed by the 'house', but overall we weren't too excited.
Afterwards, we doubled back up the Badwater road a few miles to the southern entrance`(or terminus) of the West Side Road. This dirt/gravel/rock road follows the actual path that the original settlers' wagon trains took through the valley. As its name implies, the road runs much closer to the west side of the valley than the paved badwater road, however its never really all that close to the west side of the valley, as it actually runs closer to the center. This was my first time doing any significant driving off paved roads, and the west side road is roughly 40 miles long, with no exits or entrances other than at its two ends. The first third wasn't bad at all, and was mostly small gravel with the occasional larger stone here & there. Just before the half way point, the road quality went downhill fast, and it was mostly large rocks, and very uneven. It remained that way up until the final third, where it improved to being quite good (basically compacted dirt/clay with virtually no rocks at all). Sadly, there really wasn't much to look at for most of the drive, other than ordinary desert scenery. The only two highlights were what looked like a sea of mud that was frozen. Close to the southern end, the sea was mostly salt, and was really bumpy. Near the northern end, the mud was very thin, and so brittle that it sounded like glass when it broke. The temperature also hit 100F just before we got off the road. One interesting thing is that we only saw one other car during the 2.5 hours it took to drive the length of the road, and that car ended up turning around, and passing us again a few minutes later. What seemed to work really well was to set the cruise control for 25MPH, that way I could focus on the road rather than on my speed.
Afterwards, we drove to Dante's View, which was over 6000ft above the valley floor. The drive up was fairly uneventful. The views were expectedly amazing. We could see the entire southern half of the valley. One annoying thing was that there were a ridiculous number of bees up there. Wherever we went, there was always a bee swarming around us. David (thankfully) doesn't have any fear of bees, and thought it was the funniest thing to have a bee buzzing around us all the time. David also found it highly amusing to pile little rocks on my shoes any time we stopped to take pictures anywhere. It was also windy, and relatively cool up there. By the time we reached the summit it was 71F, rather than the 96F down at Furnace Creek.
After dinner, there was about a half hour before sunset, so we hiked back out to the sand dunes, and David had a blast again. I think he'd be perfectly happy to spend the entire day playing on the sand dunes. I got a few more pictures on the dunes, and we even found a few lizards, and David spotted this large 6 legged beetles wandering around just after the sun had set.
This post is part 1 of the "dv-2006-09" series: