Yesterday at 3:00 p.m., we left Phoenix via Wickenburg, Kingman, and drove to Las Vegas in Nevada before continuing northeast to Beatty, where we spent the night at the El Portal Motel for only $38. Sometime after Las Vegas, we were pulled over out in the middle of nowhere. Turns out that the road I chose to relieve myself had some kind of military secrecy thing, and the last place I should be dealing with my bladder is on this road off the freeway. There was no ticket, just a stern warning to move along quickly.
We were staying in Beatty so we could visit the Rhyolite ghost town and head through Death Valley National Park for a second time this year.
Our plan is to cut through the park and head north at Olancha and then take the road over Yosemite from Lee Vining and maybe stay the night in Modesto, California.
Can one ever experience enough Death? I mean Death Valley. This is our third visit and we are far from bored and feel we’ve barely scratched the surface of being able to claim we’ve really seen this national park.
Spending a bit more time exploring the sand dunes as that’s the easiest and quickest thing we can do, seeing we are only supposed to be passing through.
Remnants of trees are an intriguing sign of life when everywhere else we look, we see sand, salt, and scrub brush.
How many other visitors feel kind of guilty about walking over dunes where there are no other footprints? Their pristine appearance should be left in perfection so the next visitor can experience how cool they look, but then we might as well just look at this stuff from the car. So we accept our destructive actions and trod on the virgin sand.
Dried mudflats are almost like cement or maybe more like cobblestones.
Got stuck at Stovepipe Wells talking with a guy who was working in the gift store about his years spent working in Yellowstone before moving out to Death Valley. Maybe someday we’ll be able to spend more than a week or so at Yellowstone.
How much water was pooled here that left the earth so compacted? And who was so lucky to have been here to see the mountains and deep blue skies reflected in the pool?
Not a blade of dead grass nor the remains of a bush offer evidence that anything here ever grows.
Well, this is a wicked turn of events that testifies to some serious poor trip planning on my account. In Olancha we learn that the road we intended to travel over Yosemite is closed for the season due to heavy snow that collects up that way. We’re told that the mountain passes north of that may be closed or require chains, so we might want to consider an alternate route.
Our adjusted plans take us south towards Kernville, where we can head west for a 200-mile drive across the Central Valley. This “lake” is irrigated land somewhere out here in the middle of California where so very much of our food is grown.
This being Thursday and Thanksgiving day, we decided to call it an early day and call it quits in King City. Spent the night at the Sage Motel for only $35 after having a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner at a place lost in time that we forgot to note.