Roger’s Twelve Excursions

TWELVE MEMORABLE EXCURSIONS

The shortlist for sedans, 4×4 rigs, and those on foot –

Including historical, geological, and personal notes

by Roger Mitchell

Author, Death Valley SUV Trails

Having spent my childhood years growing up in Trona, I have been exploring the main roads, backcountry trails, and hidden corners of the Death Valley country for the past sixty years. When Steve Greene, publisher of The Death Valley Journal, asked that I select a dozen of my favorite outings in Death Valley National Park, I readily agreed, with the immediate thought that this would be an easy job. Upon reflection, the task proved to be much more difficult than I had first envisioned. I wanted to give the reader a balance of outings, in which there would be something to offer everyone, from an easy drive in the family sedan to a rugged jeep trail suitable for modified four-wheel drive vehicles. Likewise, I wanted to offer a couple of hikes for the day hiker and at least one for the backpacker. Listed below are a dozen of my favorite excursions in Death Valley, my reasons for selecting them and, in some cases, a sampling of personal adventures I have experienced along the way.

THREE EXCURSIONS FOR FAMILY SEDANS & RVs

You need not be driving a lifted and otherwise modified four-wheel drive vehicle to enjoy Death Valley National Park. With proper planning and a little help from the friendly rangers at the Furnace Creek Visitor Center, you can explore new portions of the park for several days, all by staying on paved or otherwise high standard roads. While it is true that much of the Death Valley backcountry is accessible by rough roads demanding at least a vehicle providing higher under-carriage clearance than most conventional automobiles, do not be deterred from visiting the park in just a standard sedan or motor home. Listed below is a sampling of interesting places you should see.

EXCURSION #1: BADWATER

I highly recommend the 17-mile drive from the Furnace Creek Visitor Center to Badwater, because I believe it encompasses the very essence of what Death Valley is all about. If you have only one hour to spend in the park, you should use that time to drive down the valley to Badwater.

The drive will first take you past the historical Furnace Creek Ranch complex that began as Greenland Ranch in 1881. Following State Route 190 for the next mile, there are nice views of another historic site, Furnace Creek Inn, an upscale hostelry dating back to 1926.

After that first mile, a right turn will put you on the paved Badwater Road heading south down the east side of Death Valley. As you make that right turn, the elevation is right about sea level. During the course of the next 16 miles, you will make a gradual descent, before reaching Badwater at an elevation of –279 feet.

Proceeding south on the Badwater Road, look to the mountains rising high on the west. This is the Panamint Range, which culminates at 11,049’ Telescope Peak. It is not the highest mountain in the United States, but with more than 11,000 feet of elevation difference from the top to the bottom, it is certainly one of those peaks with the greatest amount of vertical relief.

A couple of miles south of Highway 190, a side road to the left goes a short distance to the start of the Golden Canyon Interpretative Trail, a short and easy self-guiding nature trail along which you will learn things about the flora, fauna, and geology, courtesy of the National Park Service.

Continuing south on the Badwater Road, the 36-mile long West Side Road soon takes off on the right. This graded dirt road descends the floor of Death Valley along the base of the bajada coming off the Panamint Mountains. Along the way, several side roads lead up into the well-watered canyons in the high Panamints. The historical significance of the West Side Road is that it passes the graves of Jim Dayton and his buddy Shorty Harris, the site of Bennett’s Long Camp where the Bennett-Arcan Party waited to be rescued early in 1850, and the Eagle Borax Works that operated briefly in the early 1880s.

About 2½ miles south of the West Side Road, the Badwater Road comes to another of my recommended excursions for automobiles. On the left is the beginning of the one-way Artist’s Drive that I talk about in Excursion #2. If time permits, take this self-guided motorized nature trail on the way back from Badwater. It is particularly nice in the late afternoon, when the sun is shining on the colorful rock formations.

A second road to the right turns off at a point 11 miles south of State Route 190. This one goes out onto the Devil’s Golf Course, giving the park visitor an opportunity to see the floor of Death Valley close up. If you elect to make this short side trip, you will see that the salt flats are anything but flat.

On the left 13 miles south of Highway 190, a rather steep 1½-mile-long side road leads up into the Black Mountains to a natural bridge. Here the forces of erosion have cut down through the old alluvial fan deposits to create a 30’ high natural bridge that is roughly 30 feet thick and 50 feet long.

Finally, some 16 miles south of State Route 190, Badwater is reached. Often billed as the lowest point in North America, it is not. A bit farther out on the salt flats there are two other places measured to be a full three feet lower than Badwater. It might be noted that some 32 countries have land areas below sea level. There are nine countries, mostly in Asia and Africa, having depressions even lower than Death Valley. The lowest place on earth is Israel’s Dead Sea, with an elevation of –1,378 feet!

While Badwater may not be the lowest spot on earth, it is certainly one of the hottest places. On the afternoon of July 10, 1913, the world’s hottest recorded temperature of 134°F was reached at Greenland Ranch (now Furnace Creek Ranch). That world record would only hold nine years, as on September 13, 1922, an Italian meteorologist in Al Azizyah, Libya, recorded a temperature of 136°F. However, on the day the 134°F temperature was reached at Greenland Ranch, it was no doubt three to five degrees warmer at Badwater; unfortunately, there was no instrument present to record it.

The place came to be named Badwater many years ago, when a government surveyor mapped the salt pond and made the notation “bad water” on his map. The name seems to have stuck. This pool of salty water (with about the same level of salinity as the world’s oceans) expands and contracts, depending on the season and the amount of precipitation that has fallen in the surrounding mountains during the previous months.

Death Valley is one of the driest places in North America, because it lies in the rain shadow of the Panamint Range, which tends to block what moisture-laden clouds manage to cross the Sierra Nevada during winter storms coming into California off the Pacific Ocean. The average annual rainfall recorded at sea level is only about a third of an inch. That figure is highly misleading, however. In 1950, and again in 2004, summer thunderstorms sent torrents of water down Furnace Creek Wash, washing away entire sections of Highway 190. The most recent incident closed portions of the park for months.

The pavement continues south of Badwater for another 55 miles, before intersecting with State Route 127 just a mile north of Shoshone. Along the way are good views of Shoreline Butte, where the wave cut terraces mark the various water levels of ancient Lake Manly. If the day is still young, and if you have an ice chest full of drinks and snacks, along with a nearly full fuel tank, you might consider driving south for another 25 miles, to return to Furnace Creek via the graded West Side Road. This round trip of 106 miles allows the visitor to really experience Death Valley.

EXCURSION #2: ARTISTS DRIVE

Artist’s Drive is a nine-mile self-guiding auto tour, just off the Badwater Road at a point 8½ miles south of its junction with Highway 190 near Furnace Creek Inn. Along the way of this motorized nature trail, the National Park Service has signs explaining the flora, fauna, and geology to be encountered. While this one-way road is paved, it does have some sharp turns and a few steep grades, making it unsuitable for vehicles pulling trailers. Nevertheless, the road is open to most motor vehicles, including RVs and tour buses.

My choice of Artists Drive as being one of the top twelve excursions for a visitor to Death Valley is based on three factors: (1) Ease of access. It is in the very heart of Death Valley, near the Furnace Creek center of visitor activities, and it is easily accessible. (2) It has a high scenic rating; and (3) it is geologically interesting, even for the layman.

Artists Drive begins at an elevation of about 160 feet below sea level, climbs nearly 1,000 feet up the alluvial fan onto the western flank of the Black Mountains. Here, a short spur to the right leads to Kaleidoscope View, where you can look up and see the Artist’s Pallet, a colorful exposure of rocks displaying various hues of brown, yellow, blue, green, and black.

Upon leaving the viewpoint, the road begins a tortuous path, twisting and turning as it descends through badlands eroded by rare desert storms. Many of the colorful rocks exposed in the low rounded hills along both sides of the road were once sand and silt, deposited in the bottom of a shallow lake during the late Miocene and early Pliocene Epochs, some 12-million years ago. Geologists usually name rock formations after the geographic area where they were best studied and described. The rocks seen along Artists Drive are appropriately named the Artist’s Drive Formation, although portions of the younger Furnace Creek Formation are also present.

EXCURSION #3: TITUS CANYON

Titus Canyon is an awesome drive. The canyon is accessible by a 26½-mile-long one-way graded dirt road that makes its way from the Nevada side of the park, up and over the crest of the Grapevine Mountains to eventually descend some 5,000 feet through Titus Canyon to the floor of Death Valley.

Always check with a ranger for the road’s current condition before attempting this excursion. The National Park Service pays a lot of attention to this road, because the canyon is such a popular park attraction. Although of gravel, the road gets regular maintenance, and is usually passable by passenger cars. Titus Canyon drains a large area above it, and because the canyon is little more than a car width in places, the narrows can be dangerous when rare desert storms build up over the mountains. The road is closed during stormy periods for safety reasons, and during the hot summer months. You should also be aware that it crosses two passes in the Grapevine Mountains, each in excess of 5,000 feet of elevation. The Titus Canyon Road can be closed by snow in the winter, because snowplows are not in the inventory of road maintenance vehicles at Death Valley National Park. When that occurs, it is still possible to drive nearly 3 miles up to the lower entrance of the canyon, and simply walk in; you need not walk very far to get a feel for the place. The Titus Canyon Road is easily accessed from either the Furnace Creek or the Stovepipe Wells area by taking the highway over Daylight Pass in the direction of Beatty, Nevada. Note your odometer reading as you cross the state line and enter Nevada. The Titus Canyon Road is on the left just 2.7 miles into Nevada, and is well marked.

For the first six miles, the graded dirt road gradually gains 800 vertical feet of elevation, as it climbs the alluvial fan coming out of the Grapevine Mountains. The roadside country becomes more interesting once the wash is entered. The surrounding mountains are largely relatively recent volcanic material, representing several phases of volcanism that occurred from five to eleven million years ago. Many of the peaks in this area are volcanic plugs, the hardened material left in the throat of a volcano after its last eruption. The sides of the volcano were made up of layers of volcanic ash, which has subsequently eroded away. What remains is the hardened lava in the throat of the volcano.

The summit of 5,100’ White Pass is reached at a point just about 14 miles from the paved highway. On the other side of the pass, the next two miles of road now descend some 500 vertical feet, through layers of green, red, and black sediments. This is the upper basin that drains through Titanothere Canyon, so named for a rhinoceros-like animal that roamed this area during the Oligocene Epoch, some 32-million years ago. The fossilized remains of this critter were scientifically excavated from a red sandstone portion of the Titus Canyon Formation in 1933. As you might guess, the landscape looked a bit different during the Oligocene than it does today. When Titanothere lived here, this was a savanna-like grassy plain, with slow-moving meandering streams and shallow lakes. Other fossils found in the Titus Canyon Formation include camel-like animals, deer, tapirs, wild dogs, and various kinds of small rodents. Remember: digging for and collecting fossils within our national parks is strictly prohibited.

The road now switchbacks up through layers of red-colored sediments to climb 5,250’ Red Pass. This is the high point of the Titus Canyon Road, a good place to pull over, get out of the car, and enjoy the expansive views. Once you drop down into Titus Canyon, the feeling of wide-open spaces will be lost.

For the next three miles, the descent of Red Pass is an easy one. Prospect holes will appear on both sides of the road and, before long, a few buildings and tailing dumps will appear. A National Park Service sign announces you are in downtown Leadville.

Leadville had its origins in 1925, when local promoter Jack Salisbury and his partners formed the Western Lead Mining Company, and attempted to develop a lead mine here. They staked more than 50 claims, but Western Lead’s pre-production troubles included such things as low-grade ore, lack of water, remoteness of the site, and transportation problems. The following year, when Western Lead failed to produce anything worth the cost to mine it, Charles Courtney Julian stepped in, sensing an opportunity where Salisbury had failed. Julian was a flamboyant huckster, whose folksy charm would coax the birds out of the trees. Julian was a man of big ideas and grandiose schemes. He was also under active investigation by the State of California for promoting worthless stock in a petroleum company he had formed. Although Charles Julian was only a minor shareholder in the Western Lead Mining Company, he, nevertheless, gained control. He would simply apply the same methods he had used to bilk money out of unsuspecting petroleum investors.

First, he bought some glowing reports from carefully selected “experts” about the size and value of the ore deposits. Next, he ran a series of newspaper ads in which he shamelessly puffed and promoted Western Lead Mines. With those preliminaries out of the way, on January 30, 1926, he began to sell the company’s stock at $1.50 per share. The stock opened the next trading day at $1.57. It was selling for more than $3.00 within weeks, even though not a single pound of lead had been produced!

In a stroke of bold genius, Julian invited potential investors to join him on a trip to Titus Canyon, where they could see, firsthand, the opportunity of a lifetime. One thousand applied to join him a fifteen-car train chartered for the occasion from the Southern Pacific Railroad. The Julian Special included eleven Pullman sleepers, two dining cars, and an observation car in the rear. Unfortunately, Julian had under-estimated the demand, and there was only room for 340 people on the train. The Julian Special left Los Angeles at 4:30 on a Saturday afternoon, March 13, 1926. The train went over Cajon Pass and through Barstow to Ludlow where, in the middle of the night, they switched to the Tonopah and Tidewater Railroad tracks. Passing through Baker, Shoshone, and Death Valley Junction in the darkness, they arrived in Beatty on Sunday morning and were greeted by 90 private automobiles Julian had hired to carry the passengers to Leadville. There were also 800 others who had driven their own cars to Beatty; thus, it was that a grand caravan of more than 300 cars set off for Leadville. The 25-mile drive from Beatty to Leadville was long and dusty, with the caravan stretched out for miles along the newly constructed road. Nevertheless, it was a happy and boisterous crowd that was greeted in Leadville by a band and a free lunch of pork, turkey, beans and beer.

The town of Leadville had been suitably prepared, as well. Not only was there telephone and telegraph service through Beatty to the outside world, but Leadville’s Main Street offered such business amenities as a general store, a barbershop, and bath house, plus Ole’s Inn, a restaurant and boarding house. Julian had gotten Nevada’s Lieutenant Governor to come give a welcoming speech. Of course, Julian spoke too, telling the crowd of the golden opportunity they had by investing in lead. Tours were offered into the mines up on the nearby hillside (which only consisted of two 100-foot-long tunnels), where heavy specimens of high-grade lead were passed around, along with wildly optimistic reports written by the “experts” that Julian had hired. His audacious stunt worked. When Western Lead Mines stock closed on Monday, March 15, it was selling for $5.30 per share!

The cycle of birth, boom, and bust proved to be a very short one in Leadville. All of Julian’s flashy newspaper ads to attract investors had also attracted the attention of state regulators, who were well aware of Julian’s past efforts to inflate stock prices with false promises to investors. On Thursday, March 18, the California Corporation Commissioner announced they were going to open an investigation of Western Lead Mining Company and its officers, and by Friday the stock had dropped to $1.55 per share. The prestigious Engineering and Mining Journal piled on, by calling Julian’s ads fraudulent; this prompted the Los Angeles Times to stop accepting advertising from him. Hearings were held in which Julian’s outrageous business practices were further exposed, and on May 27, 1926, the Los Angeles Stock Exchange ruled that the stock of the Western Lead Mining Company could no longer be traded. At the time, it was selling for 70 cents per share. With the collapse of the stock price, Leadville also collapsed; people were leaving as quickly as they had moved in. Leadville had been subdivided into 93 blocks with 1,749 lots. People, who had invested in real estate, suddenly found themselves holding the bag.

When all was said and done, Julian had invested $300,000 in promoting Western Lead Mining Company and its Leadville mines. He came away with $1.2 million. For every dollar he spent, he came away with four, not a bad return for less than a year’s work!

Julian did not quietly retire from the business, however. He went on to more mining adventures in Arizona. Jack Salisbury, one of his original partners in the Western Lead Mining Company, sued him, and Julian eventually had to file for bankruptcy. In addition, he was indicted for mail fraud in 1932. The following year, on the eve of his trial, he jumped bail and fled to China. Fearing he would be extradited back to the United States, on the night of March 24, 1934, Charles Julian took a lethal dose of poison and went to bed, never to wake up. He was buried in a pauper’s grave in Shanghai, China.

Below Leadville, the road begins to enter Titus Canyon proper. The nature of the countryside now changes, as the wide-open vistas are traded for the confines of the canyon. This is due to a fundamental change in the bedrock geology. Gone are the brightly colored 30-million-year-old volcanics of the Titus Canyon Formation. We are now surrounded by a sequence of 550-million-year-old Paleozoic marine sediments laid down on the bottom of a Cambrian Period sea floor. The road makes a sharp turn to the left and then enters the real Titus Canyon, where walls begin to rise straight up on both sides of the road.

A rare place of greenery is reached a little over 2 miles below Leadville. Klare Spring is one of the few natural springs to be found in this portion of the Grapevine Mountains. The Titus Canyon Road is closed during the summer months, because this spring is absolutely vital to wildlife in the area. The spring was also vital to prehistoric man, who moved through the area in their constant quest for food. They left behind petroglyphs, geometric designs pecked into the rocks just up the canyon from the spring. Many theories have been published purporting to read and explain petroglyphs, pictographs, and geoglyphs. In fact, however, the designs expressed in these petroglyphs can only be explained by the makers; even today’s Native Americans don’t know their real purpose or meaning.

The narrows that so delight the tourist begin four miles below Klare Spring. Whenever my wife Loris and I drive down through this portion of the canyon, our mind always flashes back to the Todra Gorge in Morocco where, many years ago, we took our honeymoon, camping in the Sahara Desert. Titus Canyon also reminds us of the Siq, a narrow defile leading to Petra, the Lost City of the Nabateans in southern Jordan. Do the lower Titus Canyon narrows remind you of anyplace you have been to previously?

For the next couple of miles, the canyon walls soar hundreds of feet straight up, while being only twenty feet apart in places, certainly no place to be on those rare occasions when thunderstorms gather over the Grapevine Mountains. Then suddenly, six miles below Klare Spring, nearly 24 miles since leaving the pavement at Nevada State Route 374, the magic of Titus Canyon ends, and you abruptly find yourself looking out into Death Valley. From here it is just under 3 miles down to the highway, where a right turn will take you to Scotty’s Castle in a little more than 21 miles. A left turn will have you at Furnace Creek Ranch in 32 miles.

THREE EXCURSIONS FOR HIGH CLEARANCE VEHICLES

You have a lot more options for your exploration of Death Valley National Park, if you have a pickup or a sport utility vehicle. Not as many choices as those driving four-wheel drive vehicles perhaps, but certainly more choices than those driving conventional cars and large motor homes. I have been to each of these locations many times, and have never felt the need to engage my four-wheel drive. Be aware, however, that all it takes is one recent storm, as rare as they might be in this arid land, to change a normally good desert road into a jeep trail, or no trail at all!

EXCURSION #4: ECHO CANYON

Taking a drive up lower Echo Canyon is one of the easiest and most delightful back road excursions in Death Valley National Park. It can easily be visited in a few hours, because of its close proximity to the Furnace Creek Ranch and the popular Texas Spring Campground. This outing offers typical canyon scenery and a lot of local history. While the road going up the lower portion of Echo Wash is certainly not recommended for use by standard passenger cars or motor homes, it usually does not require the use of four-wheel drive. The road, if it can be called that, gets no maintenance from the National Park Service, and is essentially just two wheel tracks in the wash. Composed more of gravel and coarse cobbles as opposed to soft sand, the wash is usually compacted firmly enough to support a vehicle’s weight; nevertheless, drivers of any vehicles should always be alert to the condition of the road ahead. Getting stuck is no fun.

Our excursion to Echo Canyon begins at the Furnace Creek Visitor Center. Go to the right on State Route 190 heading in the direction of Death Valley Junction. You will soon pass the front entrance to the Furnace Creek Ranch complex, where the general store, restaurant, bar, and motel reception desk are located. (Behind the parking lot are the Borax Museum with both indoor and outdoor exhibits, the golf course, date palm grove and the various motel units.) After going slightly more than a mile, just opposite the upscale Furnace Creek Inn, the Badwater Road turns off to the right. Remain on Highway 190, keeping the Furnace Creek Inn to your left.

The Pacific Coast Borax Company built the first phase of the Furnace Creek Inn in 1925. When it opened on February 1, 1926, the hotel consisted only of a kitchen, dining room, and a dozen rooms, with the hotel staff housed nearby in tents. The inn was expanded, as Death Valley began to be promoted as a tourist destination accessible from Los Angeles by the Union Pacific and Tonopah and Tidewater Railroads. The Terrace Wing was built in 1927-28, adding twenty more rooms plus a swimming pool. The year 1929 saw the addition of a nine-hole golf course and an airstrip, and the area had thriving tourist traffic even before President Herbert Hoover created Death Valley National Monument in 1933.

About a mile above the inn, look to the left for a patch of greenery that marks the location of Travertine Springs, a natural water source adequate to provide for the domestic and agricultural needs of the entire Furnace Creek visitor facilities. After about two miles, look to the left for a small sign displaying a jeep symbol and reading “Echo Canyon”. If you do not have four-wheel drive, be very cautious as you make the left turn off of Highway 190. Most of the time the roadway ahead is well defined and very firmly packed, but, if there is any sign of recent flooding, or if the tracks of previous vehicles are covered with a fresh sheet of gravel, then you may not wish to proceed.

The predominant plant here is the creosote Larrea tridentata var. glutinosa, a hardy shrub well adapted to the hot, dry desert environment. The creosote can be easily recognized by its small yellow flowers that appear in the spring, and by its short sticky leaves that emit a resinous odor when crushed between your fingers. This adaptation to arid climates takes many forms. Look at its small leaves, for example. While leaves are necessary for the shrub to manufacture its own food through a process known as photosynthesis, there are many of these leaves during the winter and spring months when it is cooler and wetter. But as the plant adapts in the heat of summer, many of the leaves drop off to prevent moisture loss. The late Edmund Jaeger, a noted desert naturalist, once documented a creosote bush in the Mojave Desert near the ghost town of Bagdad (east of Barstow) on old Route 66. The bush went 32 months without receiving a single drop of rain, and without any effective rainfall even longer. At the end of the drought, the sturdy plant had barely a leaf on it; yet, after the first good rain, it once again sprouted a full compliment of leaves, and went on with its normal life.

The root pattern of the creosote is another form of adaptation to assure its survival. In places like this, the creosote bushes tend to be spaced well apart. This is due to the fact that they send their roots out in a shallow pattern close to the surface, so that whatever moisture should fall is readily available to the plants. This same root pattern also reduces competition, by causing the plants to be spread out and not growing close together. Have you ever noticed that as you drive down any paved highway in the Mojave Desert, the creosote bushes growing nearest the roadway seem to be larger than those growing 100 feet or more away? The plants growing nearest that ribbon of asphalt send their roots towards the roadway, in order to obtain the rainfall that rolls off the impermeable surface and onto the shoulder.

As you make your way up the wash, the canyon walls gradually close in on either side of the track. If you stop for a moment and look at the gravel ledge on the right, for example, you will see that the compacted and loosely cemented gravels range in size from small grains of sand up to rocks the size of a basketball. This is part of what geologists call the Furnace Creek Formation. In some places, this geologic formation is comprised of sandstone and siltstone deposited at the bottom of a shallow lake, but here it is a two-million-year-old alluvial fan that formed at the end of the Pliocene and beginning of the Pleistocene Epochs.

After gradually ascending Echo Wash for three miles, you will enter the lower narrows of Echo Canyon, and here the bedrock geology changes. On both sides of the track, you are now seeing very old marine sediments of the Wood Canyon Formation. Laid down on the sea bottom during the Cambrian Period, these were originally layers of sand and shells, which over the last 500+ million years have been compacted, greatly compressed, thrust upwards, and cut through and through by small faults. The upper layers of this geologic formation contain trilobite fossils, some of the very oldest and most primitive marine animals to be preserved in the fossil record. Remember: the collecting of fossils, minerals, and rocks in our national parks is strictly prohibited.

The Eye of the Needle is a natural window eroded out of the bedrock where the canyon makes a hairpin curve, almost five miles in from Highway 190. After going on up the wash another half-mile, the confines of the narrows are gone and the country opens up.

At a point just less than 8 miles from State Route 190, a road to the left, now closed to all vehicles, once went to the mining camp of Schwab. If you want to visit the site of this short-lived mining camp of the 1906-07 era, you can easily walk to it. The site of Schwab is about three quarters of a mile farther up that branch of Echo Wash. Although a few people still lived here in the 1930s, very little remains today. The site is marked by bits of broken glass, small pieces of sun-bleached wood and, of course, scattered rusting cans. If you do walk in here, please leave these artifacts in place. In spite of more than 75 years of National Park Service protection, many of Schwab’s artifacts have already been picked up and taken home by unthinking visitors.

Schwab was one of many camps to spring up out of nowhere during the Greenwater boom of 1905, when prospectors scoured every gully and hillside in the Funeral Range and the Black Mountains. Most of these camps consisted of no more than a collection of white canvas tents and, perhaps, only a few hundred men. Schwab certainly fit this mold, but it was different in two ways. First, the town was created instantly. In early January of 1907, there was nothing here. By late January, five boxcars of tents and other goods had arrived by mule-drawn freight wagons, and overnight Schwab was on the map. By March, it had a population of 200. The community had a post office, telephone service with the outside world, and daily stagecoach service to Rhyolite, Nevada.

The second factor to set Schwab apart from other “flash in the pan” mining camps of that era was the presence of three strongly opinionated women, who actually had influence in the community. The trio, Mrs. F.W. Dunn and her daughter Helen Black, both from San Bernardino, together with Gertrude Fesler, a young, former stockbroker from Chicago, succeeded in banning prostitution in Schwab, and were well underway in encouraging saloon-keepers to leave as well, when the boom went bust. Just about everyone in town struck their tents, and left for greener pastures. Oh yes, the short-lived little community had been named after Charles M. Schwab, the rags-to-riches President of Bethlehem Steel, who bought control of the famous Montgomery-Shoshone Mine in Rhyolite, Nevada, in February of 1906.

Beyond the hiking trailhead to the site of Schwab, the Echo Canyon road continues on up the right branch of Echo Wash. A major side road to the left is encountered slightly more than nine miles from the paved highway. There was a small one-room cabin at this intersection the first time I came in here in 1956. At that time, the place was known as Saddle Cabin. When I returned a few years later, the only thing left of the structure were a few ashes and a concrete slab.

The road that turns off here is strictly a jeep trail. It goes over to the upper narrows of Echo Canyon, where it encounters a particularly difficult six-foot-high dry waterfall to ascend. The jeep trail does go through into Nevada, to eventually join the paved road of the Amargosa Farms area. Assuming that your high-clearance vehicle does not have four-wheel drive, keep to the right at the slab foundation, and continue straight on up the wash.

Within a half-mile is a reasonably well-preserved mill site on the left. This was the mine camp and mill site of the Inyo Mine, another spin-off of the 1905 “Greenwater excitement”. The actual mines are up on the mountainside to the north, while the ore was brought down here to be processed. This proved to be the largest and most productive mine in the Lees Camp-Echo Canyon Mining District and, indeed, the entire Funeral Mountains. Up on the mountainside to the north, hot silica-rich solutions were pushed up from great depths to intrude cracks and crevices in old Paleozoic sedimentary rocks that had been already metamorphosed into quartzite and schist. Upon cooling, the once hot solutions produced quartz, laden with various iron minerals. But, along with the iron was also gold!

The quartz veins were first discovered early in 1905, and the Inyo Mine employed enough men until 1907 to support a general store and boarding house here. A nation-wide bank panic closed the mine in 1907, and the property was idle until 1928 when it reopened, and was worked intermittently until 1940. The ore was brought down off the mountain to the mill, where it was stored in a large wooden bunker or bin to await crushing. The milling machinery here today comes from the 1930s period of operation.

The ore was first gravity fed from the bunker across a grizzly, which is like a large colander. The oversize fragments of ore would be strained out for further reduction by a sledgehammer, to a size that would pass the strainer. Below the grizzly, the ore drops into a primary crusher, in this case, a jaw crusher. At this stage, ore up to the size of a basketball was reduced to fragments no larger than a golf ball. Next, the semi-crushed ore went into a round cylinder called a ball mill. Here, as the cylinder rotated on its axis, many hardened steel balls within the cylinder pulverized the ore. Upon leaving the ball mill, the ore had been reduced to the consistency of fine sand. Finally, the crushed ore was put through a cyanide process, where the gold was chemically separated and extracted from the unwanted quartz and host rock. Gasoline engines, one of which can still be seen here, powered all of this milling machinery.

The road up the wash above the Inyo Mine camp has been closed, so it is necessary to return to Highway 190 by the same route you used to come in. If the day is still young, and you wish to explore more of this area, return to State Route 190, and turn to the left. Go up the Furnace Creek Wash a short distance to Zabriskie Point, where you can pick up Excursion #5.

EXCURSION #5: HOLE IN THE WALL

I like this excursion because: (1) it is not far from Furnace Creek Ranch, the center of activities in the park, (2) the scenery and geology make it an interesting drive, and (3) the entire outing can be done in a couple of hours, making it easy to fit into a busy schedule. This geological journey can also be combined with a trip up Echo Wash, for a full day’s outing that features even more scenery and a little history as well. The Hole in the Wall trail is just a set of tracks going up a wash, but it is mostly firm and compacted gravel that, under usual circumstances, can be driven by high-clearance vehicles, such as pickups and SUVs without four-wheel drive.

Our excursion to Hole in the Wall begins at the Furnace Creek Visitor Center. Take State Route 190 heading in the direction of Death Valley Junction. Slightly more than a mile beyond Furnace Creek Ranch and opposite the Furnace Creek Inn, the Badwater Road turns off to the right (see Excursion #1). Do not turn, but remain on Highway 190, as it begins to climb Furnace Creek Wash.

Beyond the inn, on both sides of the highway are light-brown layered sedimentary rocks interspersed with darker volcanic rocks and cobbled layers of fanglomerate, all part of the twenty-million-year old Furnace Creek Formation. At a point nearly 5 miles from the Visitor Center, a sign on the right points the way to the Zabriskie Point parking lot. This viewpoint was named after Christain Brevoort Zabriskie, a former Nevada gold miner, and later, a long time official of the Pacific Coast Borax Company and its subsidiary, the Tonopah & Tidewater Railroad. Here a wide path climbs a low ridge to the west to a scenic viewpoint, from where you can look out at Manly Beacon, a prominent peak to the west. Below are the easily eroded soft lake-bottom sediments in various hues of tan and brown. It is an easy walk from the overlook down through Golden Canyon or Gower Gulch, if arrangements can be made for a car to pick you up at the start of the Golden Canyon Nature Trail (see Excursion #1).

Prior to 1942, the occasional summer thunderstorm would send flash flood waters down Furnace Creek Wash to raise havoc with the roadways and other facilities at Furnace Creek Inn. State highways, park service, and hotel officials became tired of repairing the same damage every few years. The last straw occurred with yet another flooding event on August 2, 1942. In order to solve the problem once and for all time, they cut a bypass channel to divert water coming down Furnace Creek Wash into Gower Gulch. That bypass channel can be seen just south of the Zabriskie Point parking lot.

Did the plan work? Well yes, sort of. The unintended consequences were the rapid erosion of the soft sediments in Gower Gulch. The gully is much deeper and wider today than it was 100 years ago. Until August 15, 2004, the hotel people were happy, because their facilities were being spared flood damage. Until August 15, 2004, State Highway 190 was being spared a lot of flood damage. Only the National Park Service was unhappy, because now the flash flood waters would flow across and damage the Badwater Road, which they were responsible for maintaining. On August 15, 2004, however, a thunderstorm coming up out of Mexico produced heavy rain in the 200-square-mile area drained by Furnace Creek Wash. The mother of all flash floods occurred that, once again, made everyone unhappy. Rangers had to round up the relatively few park visitors and see them safely out of the park; fortunately, no injuries or deaths occurred. The entire national park was closed for weeks until a thorough search was made, the damage assessed, and repairs to other park roads completed. Some thirteen miles of Highway 190 were buried by sand and gravel, seriously undercut, or simply swept away. The road between Furnace Creek Inn and Death Valley Junction was closed for over 8 months. Thanks to the Gower Gulch bypass, nearly four miles of the Badwater Road was damaged and, once again, there was damage at Furnace Creek Inn. However, it is indeed an ill wind that blows no good, for the next spring was an exceptionally good year for wildflowers, attracting more park visitors than usual. At the April 29, 2005, Highway 190 reopening ceremony at Furnace Creek Inn, an Inyo County Supervisor made this observation about tourism in Death Valley: “The good Lord bringeth and the good Lord taketh away.”

After seeing the sights of Zabriskie Point, continue a little over a mile on up Highway 190. Here, again on the right, is the entrance to Twenty Mule Team Canyon, a 2.6-mile-long side trip that parallels the highway. While the road surface is dirt, it does receive regular maintenance from the National Park Service, and is suitable to all vehicles, except cars pulling trailers, buses, and RVs. The latter are prohibited, because of the narrow roadway, tight turns, and one particularly short, but steep grade near the end.

The name of this canyon is a misnomer in that no twenty mule teams ever did come this way. Nevertheless, some small-scale borax mining did take place here in the years before and after World War I. As you slowly wind your way along this tortuous roadway, you can see cracks in the upended layers of soft sediments that have been filled with borax and gypsum minerals. This is as good a place as possible to view close-up the lakebed sediments of the Furnace Creek Formation. At a point 0.4 miles from the entrance, look to the right for a layer of black lava that flowed from a nearby volcano some two to three million years ago. A little later, on our way to Hole in the Wall, we will see another aspect of this same geologic formation, a great thickness of fanglomerate sediments. When you come to a place where the road climbs steeply, makes a sharp right turn, and then drops steeply down the other side, you know the end is near. Upon returning to Highway 190, stop at the stop sign and then, when it is safe, turn to the left heading back toward Furnace Creek Inn for about three quarters of a mile. Look to the right for a small sign with the jeep symbol reading “Hole in the Wall”; this is where we turn off the highway.

As mentioned previously, I cannot recommend that drivers of conventional passenger cars, buses or RVs attempt this road. Drivers of pickups and SUVs not having four-wheel drive should be able to make it, but always use caution and good judgment. It is nearly 4 miles up the wash to the geologic oddity known as Hole in the Wall.

Just about all of the layered rocks you have had an opportunity to see close up on this excursion have been part of the Furnace Creek Formation, so named by geologists for the area they were first studied and described. This geologic formation is composed of two general types of rocks: siltstone and fanglomerate. Both are sedimentary rocks, laid down in layers, but the method of deposition is quite different. When rocks accumulate in layers, the oldest rock stratum is on the bottom, the youngest strata on the top. In the case of the Furnace Creek Formation, the youngest portions were the very soft and poorly compacted siltstone deposits exposed at Zabriskie Point and along Twenty Mule Team Canyon. The latter location had a wild card thrown into it – a lava flow. Having been formed from a molten state, lava is an igneous rock, but that is okay. All three major rock types, igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic, can occur in a single geologic formation.

It is thought that the youngest portion of the Furnace Creek Formation was formed in relatively recent times, geologically speaking. It accumulated as a fine sandy silt that built up, layer by layer, on the bottom of a very shallow lake near the end of the Miocene Epoch or the beginning of the Pliocene Epoch, some twelve million years ago. At some point during this process, lava from a nearby volcano flowed out into the lake. When the eruption ended, the lava on the lake bottom had more sand and silt deposited on top of it. Then, during the nine to ten-million-year long Pliocene Epoch, conditions changed. The landmass in this area was uplifted. The ancestral Funeral Mountains were subjected to the same forces of erosion we can see all about us today, and alluvial fans formed at the mouths of the canyons, some of the fans covering the old lake bottom sediments.

During the Pleistocene Epoch, sometimes called the Ice Age, the Funeral Formation began to develop. Once again, more volcanic action occurred, and lava covered some of the Pliocene alluvial fans. One or two million years of erosion followed, and again, shallow lakes formed, during which sand and silt accumulated on the bottom of the lakes.

Essentially then, we started working our way up through geologic time when we were on the west side of Highway 190 at Zabriskie Point and Twenty Mule Team Canyon. As we made our way up the wash nearing Hole in the Wall, we reached the relatively younger fanglomerate portion of the Furnace Creek Formation. As you approach the great V-shaped gash in a wall-like ridge of hard sandstone and fanglomerate, you may wonder how this occurred. The two geologic forces responsible for this break in the wall of rock are faulting and erosion.

A northwest-southeast trending fault, appropriately named the Furnace Creek Fault, has created the wall by pushing the rocks southwest of the fault upwards relative to the rocks on the northeast side. The ”Wall” then, is the fault escarpment. However, a stream or river was flowing to the southwest from the mountains to the northeast. Curiously, as the land on one side of the fault was rising, the stream was cutting down through the wall being created by the fault. The result was that the erosion by the stream was about the same as the land being uplifted, thus creating the Hole in the Wall.

EXCURSION #6: AGUEREBERRY POINT

The drive out to Aguereberry Point made my list of the top dozen excursions in Death Valley National Park, because the view is simply awesome. If you are not physically fit enough to make the grueling fourteen mile round trip hike up to the top of Telescope Peak, then at least take the drive out to Aguereberry Point. The six-plus mile access road is graded dirt, and by driving slowly and with the use of extreme care, most drivers will find the road is usually negotiable in the family sedan. Nevertheless, the occasional rock in the roadway causes me to recommend the road for high-clearance vehicles. Snow can occasionally cause the National Park Service to close the road for brief periods during the winter months, so if the snow seems to be low on the east facing slopes of the Panamints, you might want to check with the rangers at the Furnace Creek Visitor Center, or at Stovepipe Wells entrance station before going up there.

The road to Aguereberry Point is easy to find by taking State Route 190 to the south out of Stovepipe Wells Resort. Climb the grade for nine miles, and then turn off to the left at Emigrant Junction onto the paved Emigrant Pass Road. After another 12 miles, you will find the gravel road to the left that goes out to Aguereberry Point. The National Park Service has the intersection well marked. This is where we leave the pavement. Since leaving Stovepipe Wells, we have climbed some 5,000 feet. In the next six miles, we will gain yet another 1440 feet.

Slightly more than a half-mile down the Aguereberry Point Road, a rough side road to the right once went down to the Napoleon Mine, a small gold producer last operated in the late 1930s.

At a point slightly more than one mile in off the paved Emigrant Pass Road, the Aguereberry Point Road crosses the route of the old Skidoo pipeline. Because the ore mills of Skidoo needed water, and none was available locally, a 21-mile pipeline was built in 1907 from a spring below Telescope Peak to Skidoo. The Civilian Conservation Corps removed most of the pipe in the early 1930s, but the scar in the landscape remains. In the 1980s, a team of geologists and botanists looked at the plant recovery of the Skidoo pipeline. Their conclusion was that, in these arid climates, it takes a very long time for the endemic vegetation to make a complete recovery.

Just a few hundred feet beyond the old pipeline route, the Aguereberry Point Road now comes to yet another side road to the right. A short walk will take you to the former home site of Pete Aguereberry, a Basque prospector and miner from the French Pyrennes. At the age of fifteen, Jean Pierre Aguereberry followed his older brother Arnaud to America in 1890. The ocean crossing to New York took 13 days, followed immediately by a 13-day train ride to meet his brother in San Francisco. His first job was that of a sheepherder. The year 1900 saw Pete Aguereberry working as a miner in Nevada. His acquaintance Jim Butler made a big silver strike; Tonopah was born, and Pete was there.  He was there again in 1902 with the birth of Goldfield. In 1904, after Shorty Harris and Ed Cross made their fabulous find at Bullfrog, Pete was not far behind.

On July 1, 1905, Pete Aguereberry and his prospecting buddy Shorty Harris were on their way to Ballarat to celebrate the Fourth of July, when they stumbled upon some interesting float. It contained tiny specs of gold visible to the naked eye. They staked their claims, and quickly moved on to Ballarat to file them. Shorty was not one to remain quiet about such matters, and news of their find soon spread. Before long, a camp of white canvas tents developed; it would be known as Harrisburg.

Pete made his home here, near his mine. For the next 40 years he would call Inyo County home, while he continued to prospect and mine. While soaking his weary bones in Tecopa Hot Springs, Pete died at the age of 71 on November 23, 1945. He had wanted to be buried on the point overlooking Death Valley that carries his name, but the National Park Service would not permit it.  He was laid to rest in Lone Pine.

Just beyond the turnoff to the Aguereberry’s cabin site, the road now approaches the site of Harrisburg, the flash in the pan mining camp that sprang up after Pete and Shorty Harris made their discovery. Proceeding on to the east, the road continues to climb, as it makes its way up a draw, before turning to the south. It ascends a smaller draw, and then turns east again for the final ascent. The last half-mile to the ridge top is steep and rocky. At a point just over 6 miles from the pavement, the road abruptly ends at the viewpoint, and what a view it is. From this 6,433’ vantage point, one can look straight down onto the Furnace Creek Ranch complex. It is a perspective most park visitors will never see. That is their loss.

There is some disagreement as to just who built the road up here. Most people think it was Pete Aguereberry, perhaps because over the years, his name has been informally put on the belvedere, but that may not be true. Death Valley researcher and historian Richard Lingenfelter says the road was scraped out of sagebrush by Herman William “Bob” Eichbaum during the winter months of 1929-30. (Three years earlier, Eichbaum completed his toll road over Towne Pass and down to his new Stovepipe Wells Resort.) Lingenfelter says that the road to Aguereberry Point was built by Eichbaum as part of a larger plan for promoting tourism in the region. He liked this viewpoint, because you could look to the east right down into Furnace Creek Ranch, some 6,500 feet below. Yet, by turning 180 degrees to the west, the summit block of 14,495’ Mount Whitney could also be seen. Between them there is nearly three miles difference in vertical height. Eichbaum called the place Grandview Point, but over the years the name somehow has been changed to Aguereberry Point. By whatever name, Aguereberry Point should be on your list of places you must see in the Death Valley area.

THREE EXCURSIONS FOR FOUR-WHEEL DRIVE VEHICLES

The Death Valley country provides many opportunities for backcountry exploration for those who have a four-wheel drive vehicle. The well-watered canyons on both sides of the Panamint Range alone offer interesting scenery, history, flora, fauna, and geology. Most of these canyons are accessible by rough dirt roads put in by miners well over a century ago. If you have a sense of curiosity, like to explore new and unknown places, and have a four-wheel drive vehicle with appropriate off-highway tires, then you are sure to enjoy Death Valley National Park.

EXCURSION #7: COTTONWOOD AND MARBLE CANYONS

As everyone knows, Death Valley is as hot and dry and desolate as a place can be. Yet, here is a paradox, for amid the sun-bleached sands flow streams of sparkling water, supporting a great diversity of plant and animal life. One such place lies hidden deep within Cottonwood Canyon only a few miles west of Stovepipe Wells Resort. Here, water flowing underground from the highest portions of Hunter Mountain is forced to the surface by layers of bedrock. In its brief length of only a mile or two, the life-sustaining stream supports a riparian forest of cottonwood trees, which in turn create a habitat that supports a rich variety of wildlife. Seeing the contrast between the arid hillsides and the ribbon of green along the desert stream causes this area to make my list of top four-wheel drive excursions.

Most park visitors will never see Cottonwood or Marble Canyons, and that is their loss. Depending on the ever-changing conditions, skilled drivers of two-wheel drive pickups can sometimes negotiate the endless boulder fields and sandy washes of the inner canyons, but I would not recommend even trying it without having a high-clearance, four-wheel drive vehicle. With due care and caution by a good driver at the wheel, the average SUV should make it just fine.

This backcountry adventure begins on the west side of Highway 190, just south of the Stovepipe Wells General Store. Follow the graded dirt road west, passing the entrance to the campground on the right and the north end of the airstrip on the left. The graded road goes west, straight as an arrow towards a gash in the mountain front some eight miles ahead. In the early 1960s, when I was here for the first time, access was by this same route, except that I recall the “road” consisted only of a pair of tracks going across the desert. Since then, someone in the National Park Service got the idea to grade and otherwise widen these tracks into a graded road, at least to the canyon’s entrance. I suppose the premise was to make at least the entrance to the canyon available to all motorists. Apparently the decision maker had forgotten the old adage, If it’s not broken, don’t fix it! The well-intentioned result has been an access road that nobody likes. Not only do great plumes of dust rise after the passage of each vehicle, but, within months, the newly “improved” road develops a washboard surface from hell. Unfortunately, the damage was done with the passage of the first motor grader’s blade. It can never return to the way it was originally, and I fear that the only solution to this unnecessary problem will be to pave these first seven or eight miles.

At a point eight and a half miles beyond State Route 190, the graded road ends, as the entrance to cottonwood canyon looms high overhead. It would be best to engage your four-wheel drive, before you drop down a little and enter the sandy wash.

Cottonwood and Marble Canyons drain a large area that extends all the way to the summit of 7,328-foot Hunter Mountain, the highest point in this far northern end of the Panamint Range. The jeep trail changes each year, because all that runoff after a rare desert storm is funneled through these narrows. Sometimes these occasional flash floods wash in a new layer of sand and boulders, depositing them on top of the wash’s surface. At other times, the old surface is eroded away, exposing a new set of challenges for the driver. Any attempt to “improve” the jeep trail within the canyon would be short-lived. If it has been a long time since the last storm, you may find that so many other vehicles have been here, the jeep trail is more like a desert road with clearly defined tire tracks; simply follow in the tracks of those who have come before you. If on the other hand, you should venture in here shortly after the last incident of flooding, the visible marks left by previous vehicles may be few. Just make your way up the wash, carefully avoiding whatever boulders might be protruding above the gravel.

Seeking solitude from the campground crowds on a busy Easter weekend, my wife Loris and I once made camp on an elevated bench in the narrows, just to the left shortly after entering Cottonwood Canyon. Normally we would never consider camping in a narrow canyon such as this. The day had been warm and sunny without a cloud in the sky. It was a very pleasant April evening, and we were sitting in the early evening twilight. When the moon came up, it was full and seemed to be very bright. To our utter amazement, we noticed the night sky was full of bats, darting about as if in a frenzy. We don’t know for sure just what kind of bats they were, although, at this low elevation, we suspect they were the Western Pipistrel, which does not hibernate during the winter. These bats were apparently living in the rock crevices high in the cliffs above us. They seemed to be flying down through the narrows and out onto the creosote-covered flats just outside the canyon. In all of our years of camping out in the desert, there was only one other place where we have seen as many bats at one time. That was at dusk at the cavern entrance in Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico, and those were the larger Mexican Freetail bats.

Almost as soon as you become accustomed to the confining walls of the lower narrows, you come out of them, and the country opens up. Ahead is a large flat, and the wash seems to fork. On my first trip in here nearly 50 years ago, one of the old enameled metal signs posted by the Automobile Club of Southern California in the 1920s and 30s still stood here. As I recall, it was in pristine condition, without as much as a single bullet hole in it. On a subsequent trip, I found that the metal pole supporting the sign was still there, but the actual sign was missing.

Stay to the left upon leaving the lower narrows, and follow the tracks left by previous four-wheelers as they made their way up the wash; it forks after a mile. The right branch ascends Marble Canyon, a major drainage system that begins some 12 to 13 miles to the west in the vicinity of Goldbelt Spring. It is possible to drive up the Marble Canyon Wash for several miles. The canyon walls at one point are only seven feet apart. Just over 2 miles in from Cottonwood Wash, the National Park Service stops further vehicle access, even though it would be possible to drive another mile on up the canyon. The explanation given by the NPS for halting vehicle traffic at this point is that they wanted to put some distance between visitors and some Indian petroglyphs further on up the canyon. This is a legitimate concern, because similar petroglyphs, some four miles back near the entrance to the lower narrows in Cottonwood Canyon, have been vandalized.

When you come to the end of the jeep trail, don’t just turn around and head back down Marble Canyon; get out of your vehicle and continue on up the wash on foot. It is easy walking. If you are alert and have a keen eye, you may see marine fossils imbedded in the limestone canyon walls. Without expending much effort, I have observed crinoid stems, as well as corral. Both of these animals once lived on the bottom of a shallow Paleozoic sea many millions of years ago. Remember: fossil collecting is prohibited with the national park.

At a point 3.7 miles in, you come to a house-size chock stone that has fallen into the canyon bottom. Hikers can get around this large block of rock and continue on up the canyon to the petroglyph site.

Eventually however, you must return to your vehicle and backtrack down the wash. At the point where the wash coming out of Marble Canyon intersects with the wash in Cottonwood Canyon, turn right heading on up into Cottonwood Canyon. In a little more than a mile, the walls of Cottonwood Canyon once again begin to close in on both sides of your vehicle. There is a large cave on the left about four miles up from the turnoff to Marble Canyon. This cavity was eroded out of the fanglomerate rock by the meandering of Cottonwood Creek during wetter times of the Holocene. Man has enjoyed camping in this natural shelter for thousands of years.

If you are observant, there is a place a short distance up Cottonwood Canyon, beyond the cave, where there is a dramatic change in the bedrock geology. Again, stop, get out of your car, and closely examine the bedrock exposed on the cliff wall to the left. Notice here the brownish-colored fanglomerate on the left and compare it to the dark gray rock on the right. The fanglomerate is probably late Pliocene or early Pleistocene in age, say two-million-years old. It is a terrestrial sediment made up of compacted material that formed in an alluvial fan. The limestone is Mississippian in age, laid down as calcareous ooze and sediment in the sea bottom some 340-million-years ago. Now put your right hand, palm down, on the contact line between the two decidedly different rock units. Extend your fingers, with your right thumb on the fanglomerate, and your right forefinger on the limestone. That gap between your two fingers represents some 338-million-years of time missing from the geologic history of this area. Geologists call such a span of missing time from geologic record an unconformity.

Continuing your drive up Cottonwood Canyon, a second narrows is encountered. The rocks here on both sides of the canyon are a part of the Perdido Formation, which was deposited in the bottom of a Mississippian sea, some 330-million-years ago.

The jeep trail comes to an end at a point 19 miles in from the Stovepipe Wells Resort (not counting the 7-plus mile side trip into Marble Canyon and back out again.) Water that flows down the tiny stream at the road’s end flows all year around, although, in the heat of summer, the actual surface flow of water starts and stops, as do the cottonwood trees for which the canyon is named. From the end of the road, it is an easy two-mile hike up the stream to Cottonwood Spring, the source of all this water.

This two-mile long strip of riparian habitat is unique to Death Valley National Park, although there are a few other places within the park where water flows on the surface. Back in the old days, say 1875 to 1975, one could be guaranteed of seeing feral burros and, perhaps even wild horses, any time you came back in here. Alas, those days are gone forever. Wild horses and burros are considered to be exotic species, not natural to the park’s landscape. As a result, the National Park Service (and the BLM outside the park boundaries), have undertaken an aggressive campaign to round up the floppy-eared critters and move them to special corrals, where the public might adopt them.

It has taken a couple of decades, but the burro population in Death Valley has been reduced by 80-90 percent of what it once was. That is not to say that there are still no burros left in this area, but those that remain do not seem to be present in sufficient numbers to have an adverse effect on the native flora and fauna. And speaking of competition for water, it is unlawful to camp anywhere in the Death Valley backcountry that is closer than a quarter-mile to open water. Give the wildlife a break; their lives depend on having access to this water.

EXCURSION #8: EUREKA VALLEY TO SALINE VALLEY VIA STEEL PASS

I think it is worthwhile for a park visitor to see the Eureka Valley Sand Dunes, even if it is in a conventional car and the driver can go no farther. Those in four-wheel drive vehicles can go on, crossing Steel Pass to enter the Saline Valley, and beyond to the three hot springs. This is an excursion into a remote part of Death Valley National Park that was added in 1994 with passage of the Desert Protection Act. If you like solitude, the excursion is for you. In my view, that is part of its charm. Be forewarned, however; this area gets little visitor use, and the backcountry ranger does not patrol this way very often. This is no place to have a mechanical breakdown, or blow out your last spare tire. It is always best to attempt this jeep trail in a caravan of at least two vehicles. That warning is based on personal experience.

In October of 1969, I was out here alone in my 1964 Scout. I was going southbound from the Eureka Valley over Steel Pass, heading for the hot springs in the Saline Valley. I had begun to bog down in the soft sand just south of the pass, when I heard a sickening snap. I had previously heard stories that the rear axle on this model of car was notoriously weak and under-engineered, and I knew immediately what had happened. I had broken the rear axle.

I did not panic. I calmly analyzed my problem, and reviewed my options. Fortunately before leaving my home in Bishop, I had told my wife where I was going that day. If I did not return home by dark, she would at least have some idea where to start looking for me. Being an active member of the Inyo County Sheriff’s Search & Rescue Team, I felt confident that my team members would initiate a search for me, if I did not come home that night.

I had not brought a sleeping bag on this day trip, but I did have a heavy jacket and a two-gallon picnic jug of water. Before leaving that morning, I had also thrown into the car my 20-mm ammo box containing emergency survival supplies, including a flashlight, military ‘C’ rations, matches, a sterno stove and a medical kit. I was in no immediate danger, and I would survive. I had water, food, warm clothing, and the shelter of my car. The decision to stay with my vehicle was an easy one.

The main problem was how to get my car out! At that time, I knew of no tow truck in the entire Owens Valley having four-wheel drive, and I was pretty sure a conventional tow truck could not reach me, much less tow me out. Could I proceed on out under my own power? I found the Scout would indeed move under the power supplied to the front axle. With every revolution of the rear tires, however, the broken rear axle made an awful grinding sound as it rubbed inside the axle housing. I made the decision made to try to limp out under my own power.

I next had to think about the direction I should go. If I turned back, the nearest decent road accessible to a tow truck was at the Eureka Sand Dunes, only about seven miles away. To reach the dunes, however, I would have to retrace my way back up and over Steel Pass, on the most difficult side. Then, if I succeeded in getting over the pass, I would still have to negotiate several rough spots in Dedeckera Canyon. The alternative was to try to proceed on down the sandy wash for the next ten miles to Warm Springs. The latter choice involved soft sand in places, but no serious rocky obstacles. I did not think I could climb up to Steel Pass, and so again the decision was easy; I would try to keep going on.

I started moving forward. After the first mile, as my confidence grew, I stepped on the gas and sped up to 10 miles per hour. Upon reaching Lower Warm Springs, I found the volunteer campground host was there, but his BLM-supplied emergency radio had a dead battery. The sun was sinking lower toward the crest of the Inyo Mountains, and it was promising to be a cold night. I decided to attempt going on another five miles to the county-maintained Saline Valley Road. If I succeeded, I might then turn north, and see how close I could come to Big Pine, the nearest telephone.

To my utter amazement, I made it not only to the Saline Valley Road, but another 32 miles north, where I reached the pavement, as well as another 16 miles west to Big Pine. Finally about 9 p.m., I was able to call home and tell my wife what had happened. She was becoming frantic about my whereabouts, and she said she was about to call Captain Joe Walters of the Search and Rescue Team to report that I was missing. My long-suffering wife made the 15-minute drive from Bishop to Big Pine to pick me up, and I was home in bed by 10 p.m. I had the Scout towed to Perry Motors in Bishop the next day. As expected, I needed both a new axle and an axle housing. International beefed up the axles on subsequent models, and I replaced the old Scout with a new one.

In retrospect, I left home that morning about as prepared as I could have been, except for not leaving with a sleeping bag, and not recruiting another four-wheeler to come along in a second car. I had left word where I was going and when I expected to return. I had plenty of drinking water, food, and fuel. I brought a warm coat, a medical kit, matches, and two flashlights. I had a CB radio in the Scout, but was unable to reach anyone until I was 12 miles out of Big Pine. In those days before cell phones, communications were always the weak link in the emergency chain. Today in our backcountry travels, we always leave word with someone as to where we are going, and when we expect to return, and we try to have at least one other car accompany us. When that is not possible and we do go out alone, we carry all the usual survival gear. In addition, we have a sophisticated and powerful four-band UHF-VFH-HF amateur radio in our H3 Hummer, plus the vehicle came with a factory installed On Star telephone. Loris and I also carry our individual cell phones. Fortunately, we have not had to put our emergency communications capability to the real test, but we no longer have the feeling that we are out there alone.

Now some 40+ years later, you can retrace my path over the same route that I took on that fateful day. I can guarantee you that the surrounding country will look the same, and hopefully your experience will be more pleasant. There are two principal roads leading to the Eureka Valley Sand Dunes and the start of the jeep trail heading south over Steel Pass into the Saline Valley. It is about 44 miles from the Grapevine Ranger Station at the north end of Death Valley (near Scotty’s Castle) to the Eureka Sand Dunes. Be aware that two-thirds of this route is over a graded road with a washboard surface so severe that it will knock the fillings out of your teeth, no matter what speed you drive. Although out of the way for many park visitors, it is far easier to make the 48-mile drive to the dunes by going east out of Big Pine; that route is mostly paved.

Prior to October 30, 1994, both the Eureka Valley and the Saline Valley were under the stewardship of the Bureau of Land Management. In the early 1970s, BLM State Director Russ Penny invited me to accompany him on an aerial survey of the Eureka Valley Sand Dunes. Although it was more than ten years in the making, that flight proved to be the first step toward having the dunes registered as a Natural Landmark in 1984. Ten years later, Death Valley National Monument was upgraded to full national park status and, at the same time, the new park’s boundaries were expanded to include the Eureka Valley Sand Dunes, as well as much of the adjoining Saline Valley.

You might well ask, “And just what makes the Eureka Dunes so special?” The answer is several unique features. For starters, this wind-blown pile of sand covers a big area. The dune complex is 3.3 miles long by 1.5 miles wide, covering more than five square miles. True, there are other sand piles under the stewardship of the National Park Service that are higher and that cover larger areas. Padre Island National Seashore in Texas, for example, has some 70 miles of sandy beach, but that sand has a lot of shell material mixed in with it. It is not 100% silica sand like the Eureka Dunes. It is also true that Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado and White Sands National Monument in New Mexico have wind-blown sand covering 745 square miles and 275 square miles respectively. Further, the Colorado park has one dune that is 700 feet high. But the comparison is not fair, because both the Colorado and New Mexico units are lightweight gypsum, not true silica sand. Yes, it is true that the Kelso Dunes in the Mojave National Preserve cover some 45 square miles, an area nine times larger than the Eureka Dunes. But the highest dune in the Mojave River sink is a mere 650 feet high, while the highest dune in the Eureka Valley is a whopping 680 feet high, easily making it the highest dune in California!

The Eureka Dunes “sing” when conditions are just right. (Some say it is more like a roaring, barking, or booming sound.) Geologists have studied the phenomenon, and it has been determined that three conditions are necessary for the sand to make audible sounds: (1) the sand must be very dry, (2) the air must have a very low humidity, (3) and the individual grains of sand must be well sorted and of medium size. When these conditions exist simultaneously, small avalanches of sand can emit a moaning sound. Another place in California, where the sand can also sing, is at the Kelso Dunes in the Mojave National Preserve. Nearby in Nevada, the “booming” has been heard at Big Dune south of Beatty and at Sand Mountain near Fallon.

The National Park Service no longer permits camping on the dune field, nor are dune buggies permitted to roam about the dunes. This is to protect four very unique plants that grow here in limited numbers. They include: the rare Shining Locoweed Astragalus lentiginosus micans, as well as the rare and endangered Eureka Dune Grass Swallenia alaxandrae, the Nevada Oryctes Oryctes nevadensis, and the Eureka Evening Primrose Oenothere avita eurekensis. The Park Service has no problem with folks walking on the dunes; just don’t disturb any of the plants.

From the parking area and campground on the north side of the dunes, engage your four-wheel drive, and follow the road to the left that makes its way east around the dunes before turning south again. Expect to encounter a few places of flower-like silt in the rutted roadway. This silt turns into a bottomless quagmire of mud in wet weather. You may also find a few other places where a little fine blow-sand has drifted over the road for the first mile or two, but maintain your forward momentum, and you should be able to make it without the need to air-down your tires. Otherwise, the road is reasonably good for the first seven miles.

Things become a little more challenging upon entering Dedeckera Canyon, and your four-wheel drive should be engaged once again. Shortly after entering the canyon, the lower narrows are encountered, where there are a series of four bedrock ledges to overcome. If you are driving a big pickup or SUV having a particularly long wheel-base, say 120 inches or more, you may wish to get out and scout the route ahead on foot before attempting to drive it. Vehicles with a long overhang behind the rear axle could drag. Worse yet, vehicles with a long wheelbase could become hung up in the center. Short bobtail rigs and small to medium size SUVs should have no problem.

The upper narrows come about a quarter-mile above the lower narrows. If you have made it this far, the upper narrows will be a piece of cake. I might mention that the rocks in this canyon are of the Nopah Formation, sediments laid down in the bottom of a great sea during Cambrian Period some 550-million-years ago. This canyon was eroded into the zone of crushed rock created by a fault.

Sometimes I think that people, who wonder how some place or another gets its name, have too much time on their hands; nevertheless, I will tell you. Dedeckera Canyon is named after Dedeckera eurekensis, an unusual type of July Gold, which the California Native Plant Society considers as rare. The plant is very picky about where it chooses to grow. Its habitat is limited to north-facing limestone slopes, between 3,500 and 7,000 feet, and even then, it only grows in the White, Inyo, and Panamint Mountains. The plant was discovered and first described by Mary Dedecker, an amateur, but, nevertheless, very accomplished botanist. Both Mary and her husband Paul are dead now, but I can still remember enjoying their company around campfires over the years.

Once you are out of Dedeckera Canyon, the country opens up. The road skirts around the western edge of a large open flat covered with lots of Joshua trees. The largest of the yuccas, this tree is an indicator plant of the Mojave Desert. There are not necessarily Joshua trees throughout the Mojave Desert, but that is the only place where they grow.

The road climbs one short, but steep hill where the traction is poor. It is less than two miles from here to the summit of 4,500’ Steel Pass. The northern approach to the pass is anti-climactic, in that there is no last steep ascent to the top. The first time I passed this way was in 1964. At that time there was a register in a steel container (hence, the name Steel Pass) that had no more than a dozen names in it for any given year. The last time I passed this way, the summit register was still there, housed in a coffee can. There were a lot more entries per year, too. Today, one month may have more names inscribed than an entire year during the 1950s and 60s. Keep the tradition alive; sign the register.

It is some 15 miles from the summit of Steel Pass to Lower Warm Springs in the Saline Valley. The first two miles of the descent are a bit tricky, as you weave back and forth while attempting to dodge large boulders. Although you generally have gravity working for you, the use of four-wheel drive is, nevertheless, recommended. Once at the bottom of the grade, the next ten miles are generally down a sandy wash, and again, I suggest you keep your vehicle in four-wheel drive.

About five miles below Steel Pass, a tongue of black basalt protrudes eastward from the very large lava flow that once oozed out of the Saline Range. At the easterly most tip of this lava flow, a feature named Marble Bath is shown on the current 7.5-minute topographic map. Indeed, Marble Bath is not only located on the current West of Teakettle Junction Quadrangle, it is shown on the old 1957 15-minute Dry Mountain quadrangle, and the even older Ballarat sheet published at a scale of 1:125,000 in 1913. Over the years I have stopped here and looked around, but I have never seen any outcrops of marble, let alone anything that might even remotely be construed as a bathtub. The surface geology is simple: rough basalt lava and sandy alluvium; nothing else. No marble, no bathtub, and certainly, no water! Further, nobody that I have been in contact with in over 60 years of prowling this area seems to know why USGS put this feature on their topographic maps. I have long endeavored to obtain a definitive answer to the question: Has anyone ever seen Marble Bath and, if so, what is it?

I find no mention in any of the 534 issues of Desert Magazine. Prolific desert writers such as Bill Chalfant, Burr Belden, Eddie Edwards, and Harold & Lucile Weight have not mentioned it in any of their writings. I asked longtime Park Ranger Pete Sanchez, and former Monument Superintendent Bob Murphy; they knew nothing about it. Former Ranger T. Scott Bryan, who has written the most comprehensive guide yet to the park, cannot answer the question. Neither could veteran desert hikers Lothar Kolbig or LeRoy Johnson.

However, I did hear one interesting and humorous story at the Fifth Death Valley Conference on History and Prehistory held in 1999, which I will pass on. It seems that the late Dr. Wendell Moyer, who probably knew the Saline Valley as well as anyone who ever lived, also shared my search for Marble Bath and he, too, came away frustrated and without any answers. Wendell’s widow told us that her husband, who had a sense of humor, found an old used bathtub somewhere, hauled it into the Saline Valley in his pickup, and placed it here where the trail makes a short detour to the east. Into the tub, he then poured hundreds of large glass marbles that he had special ordered from a Dow Corning facility on the east coast. Thus, in the future, anyone passing this way would find it – a bathtub full of marbles. When we came through here in late 1999, doing one last scouting trip before publishing the first edition of Death Valley SUV Trails, we did not see the bathtub. We presume the backcountry ranger spotted it and, not sharing Wendell’s sense of humor, had some maintenance people come out and remove it.

It is about 11 more miles down the wash from the site of Marble Bath to Upper Warm Springs, the least frequented and least used in a chain of three hot springs. Unlike the two other hot springs further on down the wash, Upper Warm Springs has no man-made improvements. The last time that I measured the water temperature, it was a very pleasant 99°F, about the same as it was in the early 1960s.

The middle hot spring in this line of three is Palm Spring. You should not need the use of four-wheel drive beyond this point, although high clearance vehicles are still recommended. Palm Spring takes the overflow of bathers, when Lower Warm Springs becomes too crowded. While California does have native palm trees growing naturally at some desert waterholes in the far southern deserts, the palms here were planted by man. The name Palm Spring appears on the 1953 topographic map, so, apparently, they have been growing here for well over 50 years.

Water flows through pipes from the spring to two widely separated concrete bathing pools. During my last visit, I measured the output at the source at 123°F. On that cold December morning, the pool nearest to the spring was 108°F, a little too warm to fit my taste. The other pool was a little more comfortable at 106°F. It is a half-mile from Palm Spring to Lower Warm Springs, the center of activity in the Saline Valley.

Lower Warm Springs was relatively little known until the post World War II years, when several articles appeared in Desert Magazine. With that publicity, came the visitors. Over the years, campers have made improvements, such as enlarging the pools and lining them with concrete. Picnic facilities just sort of developed, and both grass and palm trees were successfully planted.

Although the site was nominally under their control, it was largely ignored by the BLM. In the mid-1960s, hippies took over the place, and numerous complaints by short-term visitors forced the BLM to act. I myself registered one such complaint.

I pulled into Lower Warm Springs one Saturday afternoon with my wife and two small children. We had not even gotten out of the car when my wife said, “Here comes trouble,” pointing to a guy with long hair and a long beard, and carrying a machete. The only thing he was wearing was a pair of Mexican sandals. He had come out from behind a mesquite thicket about 50 yards away, and was walking our way. I got out, but remained behind the front of my Scout as he approached.

Reaching my car, he looked inside at my terrified wife and wide-eyed kids and said, “This spring is occupied, why don’t you just move on.” Upon hearing his words, I brought out the shotgun I had been holding behind the car and out of his sight. I looked him straight in the eye, and said, “This is public land, and we like it right here.” He seemed surprised and perhaps a bit un-nerved, but replied, “Suit yourself.” He turned and walked back to the battered school bus were he and some others were apparently living. Having made my point, we had our picnic lunch, but decided the scenery might indeed be better up at Palm Spring, and we left. We elected not to camp out that night, but returned to our home in Bishop. Monday morning, I was on the telephone to the BLM in Ridgecrest. A little over a year later, Charlie Manson and his gang were rounded up at Myers Ranch in the Panamints. I have sometimes wondered, if any of those people might have been at Lower Warm Springs that day.

By the end of the decade, the BLM had its first armed law enforcement rangers. They moved the long-term squatters out, and generally cleaned the place up. Once again the general public could use the public lands at Lower Warm Springs. The BLM allowed a volunteer campground host to remain there, and left him with a radio with which he could report emergencies. The host put in many of the improvements, including two comfortable outhouses, one of them being solar powered!

Folks have been camping at Lower Warm Springs for hundreds of years, and bathing au naturale in the warm waters for just as long. The BLM and the campground host did not hassle bathers. When the park was expanded to include the Saline Valley in 1994, the Master Plan needed to be updated to include the newly added lands. To my great surprise, the “swim suit optional” tradition of Lower Warm Springs survived under the new managers. To their credit, about the only changes the National Park Service made has been to upgrade the campground a little, and to close one of the two dirt airstrips here, because of its accident-prone history.

Throughout the years, I have been keeping my eye on the water temperature here, trying to see if there were any annual changes or long term trends. At noon on December 14, 1969, I recorded the air temperature at a pleasant 61°F. The water coming out of the springs was 112°F, with the water in the nearest pool being 110°F, and the water in the big pool near the grassy lawn at 106°F. Twentynine years later, at mid afternoon on December 19, 1998, the air temperature was 54°F and the water at the source 114°F, while the water in the big pool was 106°F. If you elect to visit Lower Warm Springs, bring an accurate thermometer. How do these figures compare?

It is about seven bumpy and dusty miles from Lower Warm Springs to the Saline Valley Road, where a left turn will take you southbound 45 miles to the nearest pavement at Highway 190. By this route, the nearest gas is at Panamint Springs Resort some 13 miles away, or at Olancha or Lone Pine on Highway 395, some 32 and 35 miles respectively. A right turn will have you northbound on the Saline Valley Road; you reach the pavement at 33 miles, but it is yet another 15 miles to the nearest services at Big Pine. By all means, go out and enjoy the Eureka and Saline Valleys, but do go prepared!

EXCURSION #9: CHARLIE MANSON’S HIDEOUT

As far as I know, I never met Charlie Manson or his brood. I apparently missed them by about six weeks. My field notes indicate that Bob Boyd, Tom and Diana Jones, and I were traveling in a caravan of three cars on April 4, 1967, when Tom, the great talker of our group, stopped to ask a group of hippies living at the Myers Ranch about the road conditions on up ahead. They said they had never been up that way, and didn’t know; we drove on to find out for ourselves. As this was several years before Manson moved in, I doubt whether this particular set of crazies had anything to do with the Manson group.

My next visit was not until November 26, 1969, about six weeks after CHP Officer Purcell had pulled Charlie by the hair out from where he was hiding beneath a sink. Those days are long gone, of course, but Charlie’s hideout, the Barker Ranch, is still there, and since 1994 within the boundaries of Death Valley National Park. Having camped at Sourdough Spring several times, I can fondly remember sitting around the campfire with friends. Hopefully, you will have some fond memories of Goler Wash, Sourdough Spring, and Barker Ranch, the one time hideout of convicted mass murderer, Charles Manson.

The jumping off place for our Barker Ranch adventure is the ghost town of Ballarat in the center of Panamint Valley. Ballarat developed around 1898 as a bedroom community for the miners of the Ratcliff Mine just five miles up Pleasant Canyon to the east. At the time, there were other mines operating in just about all of the canyons on the west side of the Panamint Range. Ballarat became a supply center for them all until about 1918, when World War I ended. At its peak, there might have been nearly fifty structures in the town. Unfortunately, most of the businesses and homes were of sun-dried bricks made from local mud. Over the last 100 years, the rare desert rains, the frequent winds, and the constant pull of gravity have all combined to melt away the bricks of dried mud. The town started to deteriorate after most people left and the post office closed its doors. As a kid in the late 1940s, I can remember playing Cowboys and Indians among the ruins of Ballarat. Today, even most of those ruins are gone.

Take the oiled road going south of Ballarat along the foot of the Panamint Range. After nearly 8 miles, the oiled portion of the road suddenly ends at the entrance to the Briggs Mine. This modern-day gold mine was one of California’s largest producers of the last decade. Operated by Canyon Resources Corporation of Golden, Colorado, the mine opened in 1997, and some 80,300 ounces of gold were produced during the following year. At that time, they claimed to have an additional 653,000 ounces of gold reserves in sight. Since then, production has been intermittent, as the price of gold has fluctuated up and down.

Once past the Briggs Mine, the road down Panamint Valley reverts to its usual rough and dusty condition. A crossroads is reached at a point about 15 miles south of Ballarat; turn to the left. Still passable for high-clearance vehicles without four-wheel drive, the road climbs an alluvial fan for the next mile and a half, before entering a narrow defile known as Goler Canyon.

Just what the next four miles of road will be like when you read this is anybody’s guess. As I am writing this paragraph in January of 2009, the road is passable to two-wheel drive, high-clearance vehicles, but that condition can change at any time. In a single day, I have seen Goler Wash go from a fine, graded road to a nearly impassable boulder-strewn obstacle course. When dark black clouds come overhead, you do not want to be in Goler Canyon! Regardless of the current condition of the road going up Goler Wash, I consider this outing to be a four-wheel drive excursion. More often than not, in the last 50-plus years that I have been coming in here, the road has been awful. Yet, the challenge of driving up Goler Wash usually makes it a very memorable day.

The most “interesting” part is the narrows, encountered as you first enter the canyon. Here a series of four, normally dry waterfalls must be ascended. Flash floods can do one of two things to these rock ledges. If they happen to be covered with a layer of alluvium, the storm waters can wash away all the sand and gravel, exposing the bare bedrock. The use of four-wheel drive is needed to climb over them under these circumstances. But, I have also seen floodwaters bring in and deposit thousands of cubic yards of alluvium, sufficient to completely cover the rock ledges, creating a ramp, so you can drive over them without even realizing they are there. Under these circumstances, however, boulders are also washed in, some the size of a doghouse. If several of these large boulders happen to be in a particularly narrow place, the roadway can be blocked to all vehicles until they are dealt with in some manner.

Like all the canyons along the western side of the Panamint Range, Goler Canyon has had its share of prospectors and miners living within its confines, trying to eke out a living from the rocks high above. The remains of several of their modest cabins can still be seen in the canyon bottom. Two miles into the canyon was the Lestro Mountain Mine. As is often the case, the early history of the mine is lost, buried under the sands of antiquity. But, as recently as 1940, this mine was shipping gold ore from a five-foot-wide quartz vein embedded in granite high on the north wall of the canyon. Some 600 tons of ore came down an aerial tramline to the bottom of the canyon, before it was sent by truck some 130 miles to the custom mill at the Golden Queen Mine just south of Mojave. (At the beginning of World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt issued an Executive Order commanding the closure of all of America’s gold mines, because they took labor and other resources away from the war effort.)

The bedrock geology changes dramatically a mile farther up the canyon. Here, in a contact zone between limestone, quartzite, and metamorphosed andesite, are gold-bearing quartz veins up to four feet wide. Nobody seems to recall when this deposit was first claimed and developed, but it became the Monte Cristo Mine (later called the Lotus Mine). Located high on the south side of the canyon, the ore body was accessed from below by way of three tunnels, each being 60, 210 and 250-feet-long respectively. The miners dug upward into the gold-bearing quartz, allowing gravity to bring it down into bunkers below, from where the ore could easily be put into mine cars and taken to the surface. The ore was then transported down to the canyon bottom by two aerial tramlines and a 2,800-foot-long inclined rail-tram to yet another bunker to await transport by truck to the mill in Panamint Valley. In 1935, Carl Mengel sold the Monte Cristo Mine to Lotus Mines Inc., hence the name change. Again, total production figures are unknown, but we do know that at least $32,000 was produced during the Great Depression years of the 1930s, when the price of gold was fixed by law at $20.00 per ounce. (Assays at the time set the gold content anywhere from $2.50 to $50.00 per ton. Based on a likely average of ¾-ounce of gold per ton of ore, some 2,133 tons of ore would have to have been shipped and processed to yield $32,000).

A sign indicates the Death Valley National Park boundary at a point slightly more than 4 miles up the canyon; the road forks a tenth of a mile above the NPS sign. The left fork goes three and a half miles on to the top of Mengel Pass, the old pre-1994 national monument boundary. The last mile of road requires the use of four-wheel drive.

As you might guess, Mengel Pass is named after Carl Mengel, a prospector and miner who lost a leg in a mining accident in Nevada. Carl came to this area in 1912, and refurbished an old cabin just over the crest at Greater View Spring. During the next 32 years, he prospected, staked claims, and bought and sold mines and claims, mostly in Goler Canyon. Mengel died penniless of tuberculosis in 1944, and his cremated ashes lie within the stone monument on top of the pass that bears his name.

We are on the track of Charlie Manson’s hideout, so we will want to go to the right at this fork in the road. The spreading branches of several cottonwood trees offer welcome shade at Sourdough Spring. The spring was apparently given this name by Bill and Barbara Myers, who lived a half-mile on up the wash between 1932 and 1960. They say that the idea for the name came from Carl Mengel, who thought the ideal breakfast was sourdough pancakes and fried liver.

About a half-mile above Sourdough Spring is a low, one-story ranch house, the one time home of Bluch and Helen Thomason. After Bluch’s death, the property was sold to Jim and Kirk Barker and the place then became known as the Barker Ranch. Bill and Barbara Myers had their Ranch another third of a mile above the Barker Ranch. The Myers enjoyed the relative solitude and seclusion of their remote retreat, but recognizing the need to live in a place where their children could receive a better education, they moved to Fresno in 1960. A few years back, I spoke with the Myers’ daughter, who was very upset that the notoriety surrounding the Manson affair had attracted so many people into the area, some of whom had vandalized their property. In recent years the National Park Service has acquired both parcels.

Because there are a lot of people who were not yet born in 1969, I will try to briefly retell the story of Charles Manson, and his band of crazies. Nobody really knows for sure, but Manson’s first murder in Inyo County may have been in November of 1968, when some of his followers were thought to have been living in Olancha. Karl Stubbs, an 82-year-old resident of that quiet community, let two young men and two young women into his house for a drink of water. They assaulted him, beating him severely. Stubbs later told deputies that during this vicious and unprovoked attack, the young folks had been laughing and giggling. Stubbs later died as a result of his injuries.

Charles Manson moved his band of followers into the house at Barker Ranch in 1968. Mrs. Arlene Barker, who owned the place but lived elsewhere, had a grand daughter by the name of Cathy Gillies and, as it turned out, Cathy was one of Manson’s groupies. When Manson asked Mrs. Barker for permission to camp there, she said OK, thinking it would be only a few days, but Charlie had other ideas. After moving his brood into the Barker Ranch house, Manson made plans to murder Mrs. Barker, thinking he might gain title through Gillies. By a stroke of luck, the two creeps Manson sent to kill Mrs. Barker had a flat tire in Panamint Valley, and failed to complete their assigned task.

Let’s now fast forward to the early morning hours of August 9, 1969, when Charlie and some of his band were away from the Barker Ranch on one of their frequent raiding parties. It was then that five people, including Folgers Coffee heiress Abigail Folger and the very pregnant actress Sharon Tate, were viciously murdered at a residence in the posh Benedict Canyon section of Los Angeles, a crime that captured the national news scene, and garnered much attention because of the celebrities involved. Who would ever think that within three months, all that attention would become focused on Goler Canyon, a forgotten outpost in a remote corner of Death Valley National Monument.

The Los Angeles Police Department did not have a clue that would cause them to look at Manson. Charlie might well have gotten away with those terrible murders, but he made a big mistake when he stole a National Park Service walkie-talkie from a front-end loader left overnight at a remote jobsite. The mistake wasn’t just stealing the radio; he senselessly set the tractor on fire, too. This act of blatant vandalism really upset Ranger Dick Powell, who set about talking to folks in the Death Valley backcountry. Witness interviews indicated that a group of hippies in a red Toyota and a dune buggy had been seen in the vicinity of the NPS tractor. Through his search for witnesses, Powell learned that a band of squatters were living at both the Myers and Barker Ranches just outside the national monument. While making his rounds and talking to people, Ranger Powell spotted a red Toyota in Panamint Valley that matched the description of one of the two vehicles that had been seen near the vandalized tractor.

Law enforcement is spread out pretty thin in Inyo County, and all the agencies work closely together. On September 29, Ranger Powell and CHP Officer Jim Purcell made a friendly and unofficial stop at Barker Ranch, as any other backcountry tourist might do. They counted nine young women there, all in their late teens or early twenties, but more important, they spotted one red Toyota and one dune buggy camouflaged in the brush. They decided not to tip their hand and make any arrests at that time; this operation would require some advance planning.

Early on the morning of Thursday, October 9, 1969, Officers Powell and Purcell returned to Barker Ranch. This time they brought some friends with them, a small army of Inyo County Sheriff deputies, park rangers, CHP officers, and even a state game warden. The predawn sweep of the two ranch houses netted three males, ten females, and two infants. All were arrested, transported 120 miles to Independence, and booked into the Inyo County jail on a variety of charges.

Even though 13 members of this band had been arrested, it was thought by the authorities that there were more out there somewhere. The police reasoned that anyone with any sense, who had somehow missed getting caught in the raid, would not stick around Goler Canyon. Surely they would fear the cops might come back again, and would get out of there. On the other hand, these folks did not appear to be the sharpest knives in the drawer. The police waited three days, and then raided the two ranches again.

Powell and Purcell were very familiar with the area by this time, and they took the point. Late in the afternoon of Sunday, October 12, the two officers observed four male subjects entering the house on the Barker Ranch. In a lightening raid, the hippie-hunting duo burst through the front door with guns drawn. They arrested the four males they had seen entering their house, plus three females who were also found inside. The seven were cuffed, and moved down the canyon. Still, the group’s leader, a short bearded guy whose name was thought to be Charlie, was not among those arrested. Although it was a sunny day, the interior of the unlighted house was dark. Just to be sure he had not missed anything, Purcell decided to check the house again. He opened a cabinet door under the sink and reached inside. Upon feeling a matted mass of greasy hair, he grabbed a handful and pulled; out tumbled Charles Manson. The second raid had now produced ten more suspects. The Inyo County jail in Independence was filling up!

Conversations among some of the arrested women in jail, overheard by deputies, suggested that some of those being held in custody might have had something to do with the mass murders in Los Angeles. The Inyo County Sheriff tipped off the Los Angeles Police Department, and the telephone lines between Los Angeles and Independence began smoking, as officers of the two agencies talked and compared notes.

The pieces started to come together. The evidence seemed to suggest that in the one-month period between July 27 and August 26, 1969, Charles Manson and his band of misfits had murdered at least nine people, including the five people butchered in the Benedict Canyon house on August 9. (Gang member Sandra Good once bragged that the total number of murders committed by Manson’s group was between 35 and 40. Manson himself bragged of killing 35 people.)

In November, Inyo County Sheriff’s personnel once again returned to Goler Canyon and the Barker Ranch. This time they were not looking for suspects, but rather for evidence. The group included Inyo County District Attorney Frank Fowles, his deputy Buck Gibbens and DA investigator Jack Gardner. Also present were five LAPD Sergeants, as well as Los Angeles County District Attorney Vincent Bugliosi (who later wrote the best selling book Helter Skelter).  I had absolutely nothing to do with the arrest and search of the Barker Ranch, but as a member of the Sheriff’s Search & Rescue team, I knew people in the dept., and talked to them about their experiences at Barker Ranch. On Thanksgiving weekend, November 27-30, some friends and I decided to go up to Barker Ranch, and look at the scene first hand. We had remembered seeing a group of hippies there a few years previous and, of course, wondered if it was the same group. Buck Gibbens had told me that they had concluded their search for evidence.

Upon arriving at the ranch, we found none of the customary yellow crime scene ribbon. We looked around the house and yard, but found nothing of particular interest. Then one of our group, Herb Horne, picked up what appeared to be an aluminum pot sitting in plain view, but under a bush. Upon removing the lid, Herbie found a marijuana pipe and a corked-bottle containing a few seeds. We wondered how a bunch of highly paid district attorneys had missed that! Nevertheless, through skillfully working the crime scene and extensive follow-up by detectives, the LAPD was finally able to put Charles Manson at the scene of the Tate-LaBianca murders. On Tuesday, December 9, 57 days after Officer Purcell pulled him out from beneath that sink, Charles Manson was charged with the Tate-LaBianca murders. By this time, the Inyo County Sheriff was more than happy to transfer Manson to Los Angeles authorities.

On June 15, 1970, Charles Manson, Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie Van Houghton, and Susan Atkins were put on trial for the five Tate-LaBianca murders, and on March 29, 1971, the jury came in with a guilty verdict against all four defendants. The punishment was “death”, but the following year, before any execution could take place, a liberal California Supreme Court under Chief Justice Rose Bird ruled that the death penalty was unconstitutional; the quartet is still incarcerated in prison. Every few years, a parole board listens while Charlie tells them why he should be released, but at the moment Charles Manson is still residing at Corcoran State Prison.

The Barker Ranch story does not simply end with Manson’s conviction. There are all sorts of stories floating around of Manson burying more of his murder victims on the Barker Ranch property, some said to be buried as deep as eight feet. (I personally doubt that this group of social misfits would have either the ambition or the physical capacity to hand dig a hole that deep.)

For the next 38 years, the Barker Ranch property remained unoccupied except for short visits by curious visitors, and eventually the National Park Service acquired the private inholding. Technology was advancing rapidly during this period. In the last decade, the training of cadaver sniffing dogs has developed, along with sensitive instruments that can detect organic compounds. In April, and again in May 2008, the National Park Service temporarily closed the area around Barker Ranch, so that Inyo County authorities could conduct a search for human remains at several places of interest where cadaver dogs had “hit” on. The search failed to produce any new bodies, and Barker Ranch is once more available for public access. I should mention, that the Park Service takes a dim view of anyone digging holes to look for buried bodies or anything else in our national parks and monuments. Look and enjoy, but please leave things as you find them.

At this point, you might wonder what to do once you have seen Barker and Myers Ranches. Prior to October 31, 1994, upon leaving the Myers Ranch you could drive eastward, cross an un-named pass on the crest of the Panamint Range, and then drive on down Wingate Wash to join the West Side Road. With passage of the so-called Desert Protection Act of 1994, Congress has declared all that country to be wilderness, where motor vehicles are forever prohibited. Today you have only two options: You can backtrack down Goler Wash and return to Ballarat. Or, you can go on over Mengel Pass and into Butte Valley, and Warm Springs Canyon, coming out onto the West Side Road in Death Valley. Just over the pass, Carl Mengel’s old house at Greater View Spring is available to stay in on a first come, first served basis, and so is the rodent-proof Geologist’s Cabin at Anvil Spring.

THREE EXCURSIONS FOR FEET

In many of our national parks, there is just so much that you can see from the comfort of your car. Death Valley National Park is no exception; sometimes you just have to get out and walk. I have selected three of my most memorable hikes, one any easy scramble requiring no more than an hour or two, an overnight backpack trip that is easily extended to three or four days, and the mother of all Death Valley walks, the ascent of Telescope Peak.

EXCURSION #10: LAKE HILL

I frankly don’t know why Lake Hill is one of my memorable favorites. Perhaps it is because of the feeling of exhilaration I have felt on each of those occasions that I have scrambled up its rocky summit. Lake Hill is a two-mile long, 500-foot high hill, sticking up out of place on the floor of Panamint Valley. I was first attracted to this curiosity of geography and geology in the mid-1950s, when I was still in high school in Trona; I have been back time and time again since then. Perhaps you will experience the same attraction.

Lake Hill is easy to see, and easy to get to. It is the rocky prominence sticking upward just north of State Route 190 in the northern end of Panamint Valley. The Big Four Mine Road is the only access road. Westbound motorists leaving Death Valley on Highway 190 over Towne Pass will find the road at the bottom of the grade on the floor of Panamint Valley; it is a right turn. Eastbound motorists will find the turnoff just over 4 miles east of Panamint Springs Resort; for them it is a left turn. Follow the wide graded dirt Big Four Mine Road north for about two and a half miles. Lake Hill is on the left. As “they” say, “You cannot miss it! It is the only hill out there!”

I recall being out here alone one day in my 1964 International Scout, driving northbound towards the distant sand dunes. Upon leaving the highway, I had inserted an 8-track cartridge into my car stereo and was enjoying Beethoven’s sixth Symphony The Pastoral. Suddenly, and without any warning, there was a tremendous roar that broke my tranquil reverie. Fearing I was losing control of my car, I instinctively grabbed the steering wheel, slammed on the brakes, and looked down at the instrument panel. My immediate impression was that surely my engine had somehow blown up. But, I saw no red lights there. I had oil pressure, and the coolant temperature was normal. Upon looking back up, once again I was startled, this time by the sight of the exhaust end of a very low flying jet aircraft, perhaps fifty feet above the road and very rapidly leaving me in its wake.

I pulled over to the side of the road, and stopped in order to compose myself and calm down. I was shaking like a leaf in a breeze. By the time I got the car stopped, I could barely see the jet plane that blended in with the mountains to the north. I felt relived that I had not suffered some catastrophic engine failure after all, and more than a little foolish for being so frightened. I watched the aircraft with fascination as the pilot made a low sweeping turn out over the Panamint Valley Sand Dunes, and then started coming back towards me. The pilot returned to the Big Four Mine Road about three miles ahead of me, dropped down to an altitude of about fifty feet and was coming straight for me once again! I sat there frozen behind the wheel. Had I done something to offend this guy?

As the plane rapidly approached, I recognized the short stubby wings and large air intake ducts on either side of the fuselage. It was an F-4 Phantom. From its head-on view, however, I could see no markings to indicate whether it was a Navy or an Air Force plane. The former might have come from nearby China Lake, or possibly NAS Lemoore. An Air Force plane might have come from George AFB near Adelanto, or Nellis AFB at Las Vegas, or less likely, Edwards AFB. The second time the pilot buzzed me it was again at about 50 feet off the deck. While I was expecting it, it was still a little unnerving to see the business end of a jet fighter-bomber headed straight at me. Then, it was over as quickly as it had begun.

This incident occurred in the late 1960s, nearly 30 years before Congress passed the Desert Protection Act of 1994, in which Death Valley National Monument was upgraded to full national park status, and had its former boundaries pushed out to include Lake Hill and all of the northern end of Panamint Valley. This sort of thing could not happen today. Right? Low flying aircraft in general, and fast moving military jets in particular, are prohibited from flying low over our national parks. Right? Wrong!

Back in 2000, while scouting the roads across Sarcobatus Flat in the Nevada portion of Death Valley National Park in our Toyota 4Runner, my wife Loris and I were silently approached from the rear and were suddenly buzzed by an Air Force A-10 Warthog flying less than 100 feet overhead. In that case, the pilot actually painted us with the aircraft’s weapons acquisition radar. Once our hearts settled back down in our respective chests, we looked up to see the pilot waging his wings, which we took as a friendly hello.

In both of these incidents, were these rogue military pilots acting in flagrant violation of their orders, and in clear violation of National Park Service regulations? While it is unusual for the pilot of a fast moving military jet to buzz an unsuspecting civilian motorist, it can happen. The curious thing is that in Death Valley National Park, it could be entirely legal.

What most people do not know is that there is a written Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed by a number of agencies within the federal government, including the Department of Defense (DOD), the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the National Park Service (NPS), and the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA), which essentially says DOD owns the airspace over Range Complex R-2505. Military pilots can fly military aircraft as low as they want to, providing they are on a “training mission” or increasing pilot flight proficiency. The area designated in the MOU covers a huge portion of Southern and Central California, including large portions of Inyo, Kern, Tulare, and San Bernardino Counties. Range Complex 2505 not only covers Death Valley National Park, but Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks as well. Also included are such towns as Lone Pine, Ridgecrest, Kernville, Tehachapi and Mojave.

You might ask, “What are the chances that I, too, might be buzzed by a low flying, fast moving military aircraft?” I would say, “Slight.” In the sixty years that I have been out poking around in this country, I have had contact with low flying military aircraft only twice. But could it happen? Yes.

As you approach Lake Hill, it is easy to image that if Panamint Valley were to have a lake in its bottom, Lake Hill would be an island. This has happened in the relatively recent geological past. In fact, it has occurred not once, but a half-dozen times. Okay, you ask, “So where did all the water come from? Did it rain a lot?” During the so-called Ice Age, a not very distant period of time geologists call the Pleistocene Epoch, there were profound climate changes all over the Earth. As the planet cooled, more precipitation fell on the land. In the Sierra Nevada, it snowed so much that thousands of feet accumulated, compacted, and became glaciers covering all but the highest peaks. With so much of the Earth’s water lying on top of the continents in the form of enormous glaciers, there was a dramatic drop in the sea level, which has been estimated to be as much as 300 feet. Then for reasons science has yet to understand and explain, the Earth warmed up again. As the ice on land melted, the level of the seas rose again. This cycle occurred not just once, but at least seven times and quite possibly more.

The first cooling cycle began at the beginning of the Pleistocene Epoch 1.8 to two million years ago. The last great melting of the ice concluded as recently as 10,000-12,000 years ago, when geologists arbitrarily called an end to the Pleistocene Epoch. But if each cool and wet period in which glaciers grew were, say 250,000 years long, followed by an equally long warming period in which global precipitation was reduced and the glaciers slowly melted, then who can say with any certainty that this long term cycle of cool wet periods followed by dry warmer periods has truly ended? Indeed, if the last of the great Pleistocene glacial ice melted only 12,000 years ago, it is not unreasonable to conclude that the Earth is currently in one of those inter-glacial warm cycles. Hence, we should be discussing the great Pleistocene Epoch not in terms of the past tense, but rather the present tense. Indeed, we may well be in the middle of the Ice Age, and just don’t know it!

Okay, you say, “Just what does this have to do with Lake Hill being an island?” Going back to the question of where did the water come from to create a lake in Panamint Valley, the answer is that during the wetter cycles of the Pleistocene, there was increased precipitation throughout the world. But even then, the Sierra Nevada Range was in place as it is today, acting as a barrier to storm clouds that might otherwise move farther inland. Thus, the Death Valley country was in a rain shadow then just as it is today. Pollen from plants growing at the time, and trapped in the sticky feces piles left in 8,000-year-old packrat middens, reveals the predominate vegetation growing here. Thus, we have a rough idea as to the annual amount of rainfall needed to support those plant communities. In the case of Panamint Valley, there may have been sufficient rainfall to create a shallow lake, but not one as deep as today’s elevated shorelines indicate. Ancient Lake Panamint got most of its water from the Ice Age ancestral Owens River, just as did Lake Manley covering the floor of Death Valley!

The headwaters of the Ice Age Owens River began in the Mono Basin, just as it does today. Melt water from the long tongues of glacial ice coming down Lundy, Lee Vining, Bloody, Parker, and other canyons filled the Mono Basin to create ancient Lake Russell to a depth of 750 feet. When filled to its capacity, the overflow created the Owens River, which followed a downward path into the Owens Valley via Adobe Valley. Near the present town of Bishop, the size of the river doubled, as major tributaries came in from melting glaciers in the area of Mammoth Lakes, Rock Creek and Bishop Creeks. Then the Owens River flowed south through the Owens Valley. The area around Fossil Falls must have been in constant mist from the spray, created as the mighty river fell over Fossil Falls with a big roar.

Next, the Owens River flowed into the China Lake Basin. The overflow went through Salt Wells Canyon (called Poison Canyon by locals) into the Searles Valley. As ancient Lake Searles filled up, the waters spilled back into the China Lake Basin, and the two lakes coalesced into one.  When the water became 640 feet deep, Searles Lake overflowed into Panamint Valley by way of Layton Springs Canyon. When ancient Lake Panamint became 930 feet deep, it too overflowed, sending its excess water down Wingate Wash and into Death Valley. Geologists are not certain whether Death Valley was the final link in this chain of lakes. It probably was, but it is possible that it also overflowed to the south to eventually flow into the Colorado River and then into the Gulf of California.

Was Lake Hill ever submerged completely under water? Yes. When the water was high enough to overflow into Death Valley, Lake Hill would have been completely inundated. Were there ever people living around the shore of ancient Lake Panamint? Yes. During the last moments of the Pleistocene, there were certainly paleo-Indians in the southeast portion of Inyo County. Stone tools of the Pinto Culture have been found in the area, indicating man lived here at least 9,000 years ago. It seems reasonable to think that these ancient hunters and gatherers would have been attracted to Lake Hill. Has any sort of archaeological survey ever been done on and around Lake hill? Yes, but they have been only preliminary surveys. There may well be important archeological sites on and around the base of Lake Hill.

What should you do if you find an arrowhead or some other artifact? Do not touch it! Leave it in place. If you have a camera with you, take a close-up photo or two. If you have a GPS receiver, note it’s exact location. Then at the first opportunity, call the National Park Service during normal business hours at (760) 786-2331, and ask to be connected with anyone in the Resources Office. Tell them what it was that you found. They will send the park archaeologist out to look at the object and inventory the site.

Usually when we think of archaeological digs, we think of some Indiana Jones type person working on hands and knees, using a trowel, dental explorer, and camel’s hair brush slowly, ever so slowly, working down through a one meter by one meter grid. Back in the late 1950s, long before Lake Hill was in a wilderness area, I encountered a tractor operator digging a trench below the southern end of Lake Hill. When he stopped to measure the depth of his hole, I asked what he was doing. He said he had been hired by an archaeologist to dig a series of test trenches., because she wanted to remove several feet of topsoil that had washed in during the last few thousand years. I recognized the archaeologist’s name, and wondered what her colleagues would think, if they knew she was using a tractor on a possible archaeological site. I also wondered if she had obtained the necessary permits from the BLM.

Lake Hill is a bit of a geologic oddity, in that this pile of old Ordovician dolomite sits out here in the bottom of Panamint Valley, apparently on top of relatively recent lake bed deposits. How could that happen? A couple of geologists from the U.S. Geological Survey, Wayne Hall and Hal Stephens, looked at this question. They identified the rocks on Lake Hill as being mostly part of the 475-million-year old Ely Springs dolomite, a small amount of the Eureka quartzite, and a few acres of young basalt lava. They also found these same three rocks in the Panamint Range only four miles away to the northeast. They concluded that at some time in the geologic past, a huge section of the mountain had broken off and slowly crept down-slope to eventually come to rest here.

With the passage of the Desert Protection Act in 1994, Lake Hill was not only included within the new national park boundaries, but it was also included within a Wilderness Area. In order to climb to the high point, simply park off to one side of the road and walk the half-mile to the bottom of the hill. You have the choice of a direct assault by scrambling up the east slope directly below the summit, or taking a longer, but less steep approach by walking up the spine to the top. I usually choose the latter. There are no trails either way. You are free to select your own route.

Once on top, the view is grand. To the southeast, some twenty miles away, the summit of 11,049’ Telescope Peak dominates the skyline. Turning a little more to the south, you can look some forty miles all the way down Panamint Valley to its far end. By turning a little more to the right, that patch of green only five miles to the southwest is Panamint Springs Resort. A little more to the west are the series of relatively young volcanic rocks in the Argus Range surrounding Rainbow Canyon. Look closely, and you can catch glimpses of Highway 190 as it climbs the grade toward Lee Flat. To the north are the Panamint Valley Sand Dunes. I can think of no better place to spend an hour or two, than the top of Lake Hill.

EXCURSION #11: THE HIGH PANAMINT TRAVERSE

Backpacking in the Death Valley country is a bit of a challenge. Unlike the Sierra Nevada, where water is plentiful and there are a thousand miles of hiking trails, Death Valley has neither commodity in great abundance. Nevertheless, the Panamint Range does offer several opportunities for backcountry visits of more than one day. My favorite and most memorable backpacking excursion has been the trans-Panamint traverse between Johnson and Surprise Canyons via Panamint Pass. I have made the journey westbound from the Death Valley side, starting at the Johnson Canyon trailhead, going up past Hungry Bill’s Ranch over 8,070’ Panamint Pass, and then down Surprise Canyon to the controversial BLM gate at the lower end of Surprise Canyon. I have also taken the same route going from west to east. There are, of course, pros and cons for each direction.

The nice thing about starting in Johnson Canyon and going westbound is that all of the elevation gain is made that first day. Further, the total elevation gain is 4,200 feet, whereas the total gain going from west to east is a whopping 5,500 feet. The con side of the east to west travel is the three miles between Hungry Bill’s Ranch and Panamint Pass are very steep and, where present at all, the condition of the nearly 140-year-old trail is very poor. Trying to climb this with a full backpack makes a very strenuous ascent. Further, the last semi-reliable source of water is a spring just above Hungry Bill’s Ranch, meaning that you will have to carry all of your water up the very steep and largely trail-less portion. Should you attempt this hike in the early spring, lingering snow on the east side of Panamint Pass might well be encountered to present additional challenges.

Personally, I have always preferred the west to east route. True, going in this direction involves a total elevation gain of 5,500 feet, as opposed to only 4,200 feet on the east to west route. But, if you camp at Panamint City for a night or two, which I certainly recommend, then the climb on the first day is a more manageable 3,700 feet. What’s more, the trail is actually along the old road, where the gradient is not nearly as steep. The climb up to Panamint Pass from the site of Panamint City involves another 1,800 feet of climb, spread out over about two and a half miles of little used, but usually discernable trail. You are almost certain to encounter water at Limekiln and Brewery Springs, and there is often a little stream flowing down Surprise Canyon from Brewery Spring all the way to Chris Wicht’s Camp.

By whichever direction you choose, this is a one-way hike, meaning you will have to arrange to be picked up at the far end. The total hiking distance is about 11 miles. Strong hikers can do the traverse in one day, but I certainly don’t recommend it, as there is much to see along the way that you will miss. Assuming you have arranged for a car shuttle, and that you want to follow my suggestion to make the backpack in a west to east direction, then follow me as we head for Surprise Canyon.

The trailhead is reasonably easy to find. If you are coming from Death Valley, take State Route 190 westbound heading in the direction of Lone Pine. Go to the left at Emigrant Junction about 9 miles from Stovepipe Wells Resort. This road will take you over Emigrant Pass and down Wildrose Canyon. Once you are in Panamint Valley, simply follow the paved highway south in the direction of Trona. A stone monument marks the turnoff to Ballarat; turn to the left here, and follow the oiled road to Ballarat, once the supply center for the mines in the Panamint Range. Ballarat’s boom years began in 1898, when miners working in the Ratcliff Mine built houses of sun dried adobe brick here. By the end of World War I, the mining activity had pretty much ceased, and Ballarat’s fortunes had declined as well.

From downtown Ballarat, take the graded county-maintained Indian Ranch Road to the north. After going nearly two miles, turn off onto the Surprise Canyon Road.  Follow this road up the alluvial fan, and soon you will be in the lower narrows of Surprise Canyon. The road grade becomes more steep as the canyon walls close in. After a mile or so, the site of Chris Wicht’s Camp may be seen perched on a low ledge to the right.

Chris Wicht was one of several colorful characters associated with Panamint Valley. Tired of mining borax, he came to Ballarat in 1902 when the little camp was booming, and opened a saloon that proved to be the most popular watering hole in Panamint Valley for fifteen years. While tending bar, Chris was both shot and stabbed, but he always managed to recover. It was finally the bottle that killed Chris, although it took eighty years to do it. He is buried in Argus, once a suburb of Trona.

I can still remember occasional summer visits to Chris Wicht’s Camp, where as youngsters, my friends and I would spend the day swimming in the pond there next to his cabin. It is my recollection that there were a half-dozen structures here, one of them being Wicht’s home. Shade was provided by the canyon walls and a number of large cottonwood trees. Even under the sweltering heat of mid-summer, we always liked to go for a picnic at Chris Wicht’s Camp. The camp went unoccupied for a number of years after Wicht’s death in 1944. The Novak’s eventually acquired the property, and they attempted to rename it Novak Camp; however, for the last 60 years, I have known the place as Chris Wicht’s Camp, and I shall continue to call it that.

In 2006 the entire place, all of the buildings, the vegetation, and several old and disabled cars, burned under suspicious circumstances. The Bureau of Land Management has hosted two “Cleanup Parties” in 2007 and again in 2008, where volunteers have come in and removed years of accumulated trash. The 2008 group included nearly 100 volunteers, including members of such diverse groups as the California Wilderness Coalition, the California Off Road Vehicle Association and the California Association of 4-Wheel Drive Clubs. A total of roughly seven and a half tons of scrap metal were collected and sent to a recycler, plus another six tons of nonmetallic refuse were taken away.

Just above Chris Wicht’s place, the road essentially ends at a very sturdy locked gate. Back in the late 1990s, three environmental organizations sued the BLM for allegedly failing to properly manage their lands as these green advocacy groups (GAGS) thought proper. The focus of this litigation was generally the desert areas far to the south. When settlement negotiations were reaching their climax, the GAGS suddenly added Surprise Canyon to their want list of places of concern.

There was a reasonably good road up Surprise Canyon during most of the twentieth century, but a flash flood tore down through Surprise Canyon in 1984, severely washing out the road. The great flash flood left a couple of bedrock barriers over which a small stream flowed, creating a little waterfall. Four-wheel drive clubs found these bedrock ledges to be a great challenge, winching their vehicles up and over them. Ever on the lookout for new opportunities to shut the four-wheelers down, the three GAGS suddenly added this site to their long list of grievances, based on theoretical assertion that damage was being done to the riparian habitat. Weary of being sued time and time again, the BLM threw in the towel. Rather than making the plaintiffs prove their claim of environmental damage in court, they simply rolled over, and signed a consent decree in which the BLM would close the road to all motor vehicles, except those of the private property owners within the canyon. The BLM installed the gate here in May of 2001; it has been locked ever since.  Once this consent decree was signed and filed with the court, the BLM reneged on its promise to allow property owners access! And guess what happened next? Surprise! The property owners who were denied vehicle access to their own private land sued the BLM!

This, then, is where we must start our backpack trip up and over the High Panamints. The elevation here at the locked gate is about 2,600 feet. Once over the waterfalls, the hiker can walk on the old pre-gate road. Depending on the time of year, you may be able to follow a stream of flowing water, as you climb steadily up the canyon. The stream does not always continue to flow during the heat of summer and into the fall. Most other times of the year, it is not unusual to find surface water flowing all the way from Chris Wicht’s Camp up to Brewery Spring, a distance of about three miles. If the stream is not flowing, the first water will be found at Limekiln Spring, 1.7 miles above Chris Wicht’s Camp. Brewery Spring is found a little over a mile above Limekiln Spring. Upon leaving Brewery Spring, some backpackers carry all the water that they can, at least a gallon, for there is none between here and Hungry Bill’s Ranch on the other side of Panamint Pass. For this reason, some may choose to camp here at the spring, where there is ample water.

Continue walking up the two parallel tire tracks and in another couple of miles you should see the red brick smelter chimney and other old ruins of Panamint City. Prior to October of 1994, the Death Valley National Monument boundary was along the crest of the Panamint Range, but with the passage of the Desert Protection Act, the boundaries of the new national park were extended west of the crest, roughly halfway down the western flank of the range. Today, the site of old Panamint City is well within Death Valley National Park. Remember folks: the collecting of artifacts is strictly prohibited.

At the time of my first visit in the early 1950s, I was probably in the sixth grade. At that time, most of the buildings were gone, either having collapsed under the weight of heavy winter snows, or dismantled so their lumber could be salvaged and used elsewhere. But one fascinating structure that did still remain was the red brick chimney and base foundations of the old smelter. This furnace turned out silver ingots between the years of 1874 and 1876.

It all started in December of 1872, when a group led by veteran prospector Richard Jacobs battled bone-chilling cold to discover silver float at about 8,000 feet in the Panamint Range. Winter snows chased Jacobs out of the high country until the following April, when the group returned and began staking claims. Unlike some mining camps, Panamint City did not immediately boom at the first sight of valuable mineral. By the fall of 1873, the town site had been mapped out, but the camp consisted of only twenty men. With the arrival of winter, one mine hired 36 miners to begin tunneling into the orebody. Panamint City would have to wait until March of 1874 for the arrival of the first ore mill. It was a big day for the residents of Panamint City, but, unfortunately, the little hamlet still had no saloons! Nevertheless, assay reports on the ore were looking good.

In the summer of 1874, Nevada Senators Jones and Stewart thought that the silver hidden high in the Panamints just might turn out to be a California Comstock, and if that proved to be the case, they wanted in on the action. The duo started buying up claims and entire mines, even though the first bars of silver had not yet been poured. It was the news of Jones’ and Stewart’s sudden financial interests that triggered the rush to Panamint.

There were more ways than one to make money in mining than just extracting ore from the ground. Jones and Stewart formed the Surprise Valley Mill and Water Company with money raised by selling the company’s stock. Senator Jones’ brother Henry was put in charge of the Panamint operations, and began selling lots in Panamint City. Lots located on the town’s mile-long Main Street and measuring 25’x100’ were sold for $100 to $300 each, with choice locations going for $1000. The senators reasoned that he who controls the water, controls not only the ore mills, but the town itself. The company built a reservoir and a mile-long pipeline to supply the town’s water needs. Jones also acquired Jacobs’ five-stamp mill, which was lying on the ground in pieces awaiting assembly. The first ore was hand picked, and it came down the steep canyon walls on the backs of pack animals. It contained silver worth $300 per ton. This ore was crushed and concentrated, before being shipped all the way to England to be smelted. This was an expensive method to smelt the silver; nevertheless, the net return was $200 per ton.

Based on the theory that one must spend money to make money, the good senators instructed Henry to build an aerial tramline in which their Wyoming Mine could send ore down the mountainside, a vertical drop of 1000 feet. But the most remarkable project to be undertaken was the construction of a 20-stamp mill to crush the ore, along with two Stetefeldt reduction furnaces. A half-million red bricks were used in construction of the furnaces and the tall smokestack.

Panamint City had a population of 2,000 by the winter of 1874-75 and was the biggest town for 100 miles around. Panamint City may have been a thoroughly modern metropolis, but its citizens were a rough, rowdy and raucous bunch. During the camp’s first two years, the death toll averaged about 2.3 per month, mostly from shootings or knife wounds. The basic needs of the men were provided by the saloons, of which there were several, and the ladies of Maiden Lane. In addition, the camp boasted of having several large stores of general merchandise, boarding houses, restaurants, butcher shops, barber shops, livery stables, an assay office, booteries, bakeries, drug stores, three doctors and, of course, four lawyers. The Panamint News provided all the latest news. There was daily mail service and twice a week stagecoach service to Lone Pine.

Jones and Stewart not only owned several of the mines and the town’s water service, but, for a time, they also owned the only reduction mill in the Panamint Range. Jones and Stewart even offered once a week stagecoach service with Los Angeles. Several freight lines brought mining equipment and supplies in to Panamint City, and left with silver ingots, with armed guards accompanying each outgoing shipment of silver. This extra protection was sometimes adequate, sometimes not. Then someone got the bright idea to ship their silver, not in brick size ingots, but rather in one large and very heavy ball. It worked; the robbers could do nothing with a large mass of silver like that, so the highwaymen had to turn their attention to robbing the people using stage coaches.

Panamint City had two good years, 1874 and 1875, when rich pockets were found near the surface. Then, as the mines went deeper into the ridge tops, the value of the ore diminished. One by one, the mines closed and stopped sending ore to the furnaces of Panamint. With nothing to sustain them, the furnaces went cold forever. People found no reason to stay in Panamint City throughout 1876, and one by one they drifted away to seek their fame and fortune elsewhere. Slowly, ever so slowly, Panamint City ended, not with a bang, but with a whimper.

If it were not for the enormous chimney of the reduction furnace that is still standing, it would be difficult for today’s visitor to imagine what the mile-long Main Street looked like. Nevertheless, anyone backpacking through Surprise Canyon will be missing a lot if they do not spend at least one full day exploring the ridges above the town. To the south, you can ascend the ridge between Magazine Canyon on the left and Marvel Canyon on the right to visit the Wyoming Mine, the best producer of all of Panamint’s Mines. Sourdough Canyon and Woodpecker Canyon offer more mines and high mountain scenery on the north side of town.

Once you have seen the best of Panamint City and its environs and it is time to move on, hoist your pack on your back and follow the old road leading farther up Surprise Canyon. Watch carefully for a trail that turns off to the right about a half-mile beyond the brick smelter. At one time, there was a small rock cairn to mark the beginning of the old pack trail.

The road ahead goes a third of a mile or so to the Thompson Camp, the one time home of the infamous Thompson sisters. I first visited Panamint City when I was a kid living in Trona. A friend of my parents who was a prospector, a miner and a desert rat, Ed Kirk took me under his wing and showed me the sights of the Argus, Slate, and Panamint Ranges. From the right front seat of Ed’s Model A flat-bed truck, I heard tales of the colorful people who once lived here and of the events of their time. It was on one of our outings that he coaxed that old Ford truck up Surprise Canyon. On that first visit, in the early 1950s, nobody was living in Panamint City, but here one of the surviving Thompson sisters had lived since the 1920s.

On the way up the canyon, Ed told me all sorts of stories about Shotgun Mary Thompson and her sister Orpha Hart. It seems that these cantankerous women could never get along with their neighbors living in the adjoining canyons. Not only could they not get along with their neighbors, they had several armed confrontations. Nobody ever got shot and the pair were never arrested, but the Inyo County Sheriff and his deputies made several visits to the Thompsons in an effort to avoid bloodshed.

Ed wanted to talk to one of the sisters about some mining claims, and he was not sure how he would be received. To smooth the way, he brought a large bottle of red wine and a six-pack of Lucky Lager Beer. Upon chugging up to the old wooden cabin where the Thompsons had lived for the last 25-30 years, with me in tow behind him carrying the wine, Ed walked boldly up to the cabin. Before he had a chance to knock, the door was suddenly thrown open, and standing there was a short elderly woman wearing Levis and some sort of housecoat. Even before he said a word, Ed thrust the six-pack at her, and then introduced himself. The woman’s scowl brightened into a big smile, and she invited us in.

In retrospect, I have wondered if Ed had invited me along that day believing that the woman would be less likely to shoot him, if he had a kid with him. His strategy worked. We were served coffee in tin cups, and the atmosphere was very cordial. Nevertheless, I kept my eye on the long double barrel shotgun standing in the corner near the door. Unfortunately, in the 60 years since that visit, I can still vividly recall the sweet bitter taste of that black coffee, but I do not recall to which sister we were talking. Was it Shotgun Mary or Orpha?

Once you find the foot trail leaving the road to Thompson’s Camp, follow it. The trail will turn to the southeast and begin climbing Frenchman’s Canyon. Pace yourself, and take your time. It is about two miles to the top of Panamint Pass, with an elevation gain of about 1,700 feet. Be alert as you make your way up the trail; it is faint in some places, and very obvious in others. Considering that it has not had much use since 1876, it is a wonder that it is still here at all.

This Pinyon pine forest was not here in 1876, when the mines closed and the furnaces no longer needed to burn. By 1875, the Pinyon forest all around Panamint City had been decimated by the woodsman’s ax. Then, as it still is today, the Pinyon was considered to make good firewood for home heating and cooking. It was also burned as a fuel for the two ore reducing furnaces in Panamint City.

Once you reach Panamint Pass, you will discover another reason why I like doing this traverse in a west to east direction – the view. Let your eye wander down the Johnson Canyon drainage and out onto the shimmering white floor of Death Valley beyond.

From here on the summit of 8,070’ Panamint Pass, it is still another five miles down to the road’s end, where your ride back is presumably waiting. In some respects, this is the most difficult part of the entire journey. Fortunately it is all downhill. Essentially the trail can be divided into three segments in terms of its condition. The first portion of the trail consists of about a mile of tight switchbacks. It is easy to be distracted by the scenic views to the east, and miss the faint trail; you must always be alert to where the trail goes. Once you descend the slope and are in the canyon bottom, the next segment of trail is not so steep, but at times equally challenging, as you start down the wash in upper Johnson Canyon. It is about two miles down the canyon to Hungry Bill’s Ranch.

For the most part, the old trail no longer exists, but the way you want to go is obvious; just keep heading down the wash. Along the way you will encounter a couple of springs. The first spring is choked with willows and other vegetation. It is inaccessible for all intents and purposes; bypass it high on the left. The Pinyon forest is left behind below the first spring, and you may find the route selection easier by staying on the south side of the canyon. If you are running short of water, the second spring should offer access to it, but always filter your water before drinking it.

Finally, after coming about three miles down off the pass, Johnson Canyon opens up a bit, and you will come to terraced flat areas surrounded by rock walls. This is the site of Hungry Bill’s Ranch. It is not unreasonable to assume that Native Americans occupied this site for perhaps hundreds of years before Hungry Bill came along. To my knowledge, no comprehensive archaeological survey has ever been made of the site. It is thought that 150 to 200 years ago the Shoshone Indian village of Puaitungani (the name apparently means Mouse Cave) was located here. We do not know if their was a village here in 1874, but we do know that a Kentuckian by the name of William Johnson came here around that time. Johnson terraced the land, and built stone fences with the rocks he cleared from the fields. He dug ditches to irrigate his newly reclaimed land. Next Johnson planted vegetables and fruit trees. The last phase in his ambitious undertaking was to build a mule trail up the canyon to Panamint Pass and beyond to Panamint City. Johnson’s plan was to sell fruits and vegetables to the hungry residents of Panamint City.

Yes, the trail we used to cross the pass was built by Johnson around 1873-74; some have referred it to “The Vegetable Road”. His first season went so well, that he terraced even more land and started orchards of apples, pears, peaches, apricots, and figs. Unfortunately for Johnson, the cycle of birth, boom, and bust all occurred in Panamint City before Johnson could harvest his first crop of tree fruit. When Johnson lost his customers, he too moved on.

After Johnson’s departure, a Shoshone Indian of immense size and appetite named Hungry Bill came along. He filed a homestead claim, and lived here off and on until his death in 1919. Even though the site has been unoccupied for nearly a century, some of Johnson’s fruit trees are still alive, producing a few scrawny apples.

Below Hungry Bill’s Ranch, the trail gets a lot more use and is easy to see. It is less than two miles down the canyon to the trailhead and the end of the Johnson Canyon Road where, hopefully, your ride home will be waiting for you.

EXCURSION #12: THE ASCENT OF TELESCOPE PEAK

There is no doubt in my mind that the finest hike in the park is the ascent of Telescope Peak. Granted, it is not for everyone. Those who are very young, very old, or not physically fit should not even consider it. If you think you are up to the grueling all day hike, I say, “Go for it!” I can guarantee the climb is an experience you will never forget. On the walk up, if the views down into Death Valley will not take your breath away, the altitude will. Budget the entire day for this ambitious enterprise, and get an early start. I recommend every hiker carry four quarts of water: three for the climb, and one for the return. Expect it to be cool on the summit. Carry a camera and binoculars; they are worth the extra weight. While an early summer climb is probably best, you can go just about anytime, except during the winter and early spring months, when the trail is buried under snow, and is dangerously icy.

The access road as far as the charcoal kilns is reasonably good, but the final 1½ miles to the Mahogany Flat trailhead are not maintained to a high standard, and are more suitable to high-clearance vehicles. The drivers of standard passenger cars should drive very carefully to avoid damage to the undercarriage. The elevation at the Mahogany Flat trailhead is 8,133’, so the total gain on the ascent of Telescope Peak is nearly 3,000’. Allow four to five hours for the ascent, and two to three hours to come back down to the trailhead. The highest campground in the park is located at the Mahogany Flat trailhead, and many climbers elect to spend the night there before setting off. That not only allows for an early start in the morning, but it allows your body a few extra hours to become acclimatized. The seven-mile trail from Mahogany Flats to the summit is well engineered, and usually in good condition. The summit block itself is rounded and without any serious exposures.

Notice the changes in vegetation as you walk up the trail out of Mahogany Flat. Sometimes these changes are very subtle and easy to miss; other times the changes may be very dramatic, and almost shout at you. Examples of the latter are the trees. The Pinyon pine Pinus monophylla, so common at Mahogany Flat, is rarely seen growing above 9,300’; on the other hand, the Limber pine Pinus flexilis rarely grow below that elevation. The Limber pine can easily be distinguished from the Pinyon by the fact that its needles come in clusters of five, as opposed to the Pinyon’s single needle. Don’t be fooled, however. There is a second tree on Telescope Peak that also has needles of five, and shares much of the sub-alpine habitat with the Limber pine. It is the Bristlecone pine Pinus longaeva, often thought of as the longest living thing. Dendrochronolgy, or tree ring dating, of several specimens in the White Mountains, just a few miles to the northwest, has shown their ages to be between 4,300 and 4,600 years. Tree-ring dating of the Pinyon pines back down at the charcoal kilns produced only four trees whose ages went back 400 years. Thus, ten generations of Pinyons might sprout from seed, grow to maturity, and die of old age within the lifespan of a single Bristlecone pine.

The grade of the trail is gentle, but unrelenting. Take your time, stop to rest as needed, and drink plenty of water. Nibbling on a high-energy snack from time to time will also help.

Once you are on the summit of Telescope Peak, catch your breath and take in the view. Lying at your feet to the east are the sparkling white salt flats on the floor of Death Valley. Just beyond the valley are the Grapevine, Black, and Funeral Mountains, and beyond them lies Nevada. Due east, about 75 air miles away, is 11,519’ Mount Charleston, the high point in Nevada’s Spring Range. By turning to the southeast, you can see Clark Mountain some 90 miles away, while looking due south on a very clear day, the 11,499’ summit of Mount San Gorgonio can barely be seen some 140 miles away. Turning a little to the right, to the south-southwest, 10,049’ Mt. San Antonio (Old Baldy), the highest point in the San Gabriel Mountains, appears on the distant horizon. It is about 135 miles away as the crow flies. Looking due west, the crest of the Sierra Nevada appears. A mere 60 miles away, 12,123’ Olancha Peak sticks out all by itself, but, by turning to the northwest and using binoculars, you can pick out the lofty 14,495’ summit of Mount Whitney, some 70 miles distant. It simply doesn’t get any better than this, folks, particularly when considering we are just fifteen miles from the lowest point in North America. Can there be any wonder why I consider the climb up to the summit of Telescope Peak to be among my top dozen excursions in Death Valley?

I have witnessed two really awesome events in my life, which had a profound effect on my psyche. One was natural; the other man made. One of those events occurred here on the summit of Telescope Peak. The natural event was in December of 1959, when I stood within a quarter-mile of the Kilauea Iki Volcano in Hawaii as it was erupting. Each eruption cycle would start with a tremor that would grow in intensity. I could first feel it in my feet; then the perception crept up my body. As the intensity of the earth movement grew, next came the audible part of the event, a rumble that also intensified with the ground movement. Not only could I hear it, I could also feel it in my throat. Then, simultaneously, a blast of heat would strike me in the face, as I looked upward to see a great fountain of fire and burning ash erupt and blow 1,000 feet above me into the night sky. The fountain of fire would recede after a few minutes, and a pool of molten rock would flow back down into the hole in the earth from whence it had come. Events of nature – hurricanes, typhoons, tsunamis, and tornados – all cause man to be a little humble.

Yet I have experienced one other such humbling event, that was not natural, but rather the creation of man. I witnessed the detonation of a nuclear weapon from the summit of Telescope Peak!

During the 1950s and into the 1960s, the Atomic Energy Commission, or AEC (now called the Department of Energy) and the Defense Department conducted more than 1000 nuclear detonations at Frenchman Flat, Yucca Flat, and at other places within the sprawling Nevada Test Site between Tonopah and Las Vegas. At first, these nuclear weapons were set off at ground level, or from airbursts with the device set high on a tower, or dropped from an aircraft. Eventually, the testing went underground. The AEC would make an announcement a few days preceding each test, so the good folks living in Tonopah, Goldfield, Beatty and Las Vegas would not be alarmed when the bomb did go off. The first nuclear tests began in Nevada January 27, 1951, when a 1 kiloton A-Bomb was dropped on Frenchman Flat. The last atmospheric detonation occurred in Nevada on July 17, 1962. The last underground test occurred in Nevada on September 23, 1992. During this 41-year period, there have been a total of 204 nuclear detonations in the atmosphere over Nevada, plus over 800 underground nuclear detonations.

I can recall more than one occasion when, as a child growing up in Trona, I watched from the school play yard as the top of the mushroom-shaped cloud rose up over the Slate Range. A few years later, after the announcement in the Trona Argonaut of yet another test to be conducted, some friends and I were speculating that, if the mushroom cloud could be seen from the bottom of Searles Valley some 110 miles away, wouldn’t it be really neat to view the explosion from a closer vantage point. If not closer, then perhaps a higher vantage point might be just as good. Then someone suggested the top of Telescope Peak, and we made plans to do just that. We were not disappointed!

I do not recall the time, date, or even the year, but we did climb Telescope Peak in the dark, arriving at the summit before dawn. We sat around, huddled together to conserve our body heat against a light westerly wind. We looked to the northeast as dawn broke, but nothing happened. Was it a dud, or was the blast yet to come? It seemed that nobody in our group actually remembered the announced time of the test. We decided to wait around until noon. Having had no sleep the previous night, we all laid down in a futile attempt to get comfortable on the rocky ground, and soon fell asleep.

Suddenly, I was instantly awakened by a bright red flash that penetrated and burned through my eyelids. I jerked my head up to see my buddies had all been awakened, too. By the time we were on our feet, the intensity of the light was fading away. The breeze had stopped blowing, and the air was very still and very quiet as we looked to the northeast. Was it over? Is that all there is to it? The time was a few minutes after 9 a.m. Perhaps a minute or two later, we could see the top of a swirling cloud above a distant mountain. Next, a blast of heat hit us in the face, and instantly the air around us seemed warmer. Finally, perhaps as long as five minutes after the explosion, we heard the sound of the blast, a sharp loud noise followed by a rumble that tapered off after a minute, leaving us again in stillness. The reason for the long delay between the flash and the sound of the explosion is that light travels at 186,000 miles per second, whereas sound travels at only 1100 feet per second. Thus, the sound of the explosion lags far behind the flash. One of the guys had the presence of mind to look at his watch and note the time. The sound arrived a few seconds over six minutes later. By doing the math, we figured we were about 75-80 miles away from ground zero.

I later reflected that, like standing at the edge of the volcano, the two experiences were very similar. Yet one was a product of nature, and very common in the history of the earth, while the other, equally awesome in its ability to alter and destroy everything in its path, was made by man.  It is a very sobering thought!

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You may order Roger’s comprehensive Death Valley SUV Trails book HERE.