more logs from the desert

More older entries from my vacation in the desert. Pictures will get uploaded once I'm back home (hopefully this weekend)...

The first night in Gold Point was interesting. The cabins technically have running (cold) water, but its been shutoff for the winter, so we had no running water. We did have electricity & heat (thankfully). Gold Point is basically a bed & breakfast of sorts, although we get all the meals. The food was very good. Both nights were very rough, because David refused to sleep as long as he could see or hear us. So he would stand up in his playpen (which was doubling for a crib) and cry forever. The first night (of 2) we went outside to look at the stars when we put him to bed. We could hear him crying for a short while, but he did fall asleep ok. The stars were amazing, both because we were so isolated (Gold Point is about 50 miles from the nearly town with services (gas, food, etc), so there was no light polution at all, and also because we were in the desert, so the air was fairly clear. Unfortunately, David didn't eat well at dinner that night (our theory is because there was no hichair, so he could see the food, and wasn't interested in eating as a result), so he woke up at 2AM crying, with his stomach growling. We fed him some cherrios, but then he refused to fall asleep again, crying whenever we put him back in his playpen. I ended up holding him while sitting, and he fell asleep in my lap, but that took almost 2 hours. We woke the next morning, and it was so COLD. We didn't have a thermometer (plus there was no TV or radio), but there was frost on the car. We were able to take a shower at the house of the proprieter, and got a good breakfast. At 11AM, we all piled into his pickup truck, and he took us up into the distant mountains, down a dirt road to show us old ranches, and abandoned mining camps. It was a bit crowded (the 4 of us, with David on my lap) in the truck, and since the road was usually very rocky or dirt, also quite bumpy. But at any rate, we saw some amazing places that we'd never have found without local guidance. We saw an old cattle ranch, and then an active Gold mining operation, and then we really went up into the mountains, were we saw several old abandoned mining camps. It started to snow, and the snow was sticking everywhere. The camps were somewhat creepy, because they were in horrid condition, with supplies (everything from shoes, to canned food, to old newspapers) littered everywhere inside & out. It was interesting none the less. At one point we stopped on a steep cliff, and could see all the way into Death Valley, nearly 75 miles west. As we came back down from the mountains the snow disapeared. Because the valley that Gold Point is situated in is so wide & flat, with mountains almost all around its perimeter, we could see for miles in all directions. After we got back, we got into a different truck and drove about 10 miles across the valley to a huge water tank, connected to a mountain spring, which is where all the water from the town got trucked in. They kept a 6000 gallon underground water tank. It was odd to think about how their survival depended on being able to bring in their own water on a regular basis. The town also didn't get daily mail delivery, but instead had it brought in from a different town via courier. That night was basically a repeat of the previous, with david not sleeping well, which meant that we didn't either.

More back logs to come....