Death Valley Off-Road Adventures

These recent post are a reminder to read and research thoroughly before you turn in your ballots. Too many places get closed to access.

 

I’ve never been to Death Valley but have become intrigued with it courtesy of this thread along with @DVexile, @ETAV8R, and @Crom 's build threads. It’s now on my list of places I want to go to. Looking at those videos and pictures of the Jeeps going up Surprise Canyon, I can’t imaging a road ever existing there. I know Desert rains and thunderstorms can totally change the landscape but this is crazy to me. My Google searches fail to bring up any old pics showing the road. Does anyone have any pics of the old road?

 

A big part of the lure is researching the history of DV. There are any number of books listed below or articles you find online.

Who knows? Maybe you’ll find other places, like the Ancient Bristolcone Pines to visit as well?

It is a great place full of history.

 

Hey. Knock it off. You're starting to mention spots way to close to my neighborhood. lol

 

A big pile of gravel can smooth almost anything out and it is my understanding that's what a lot of the roads up these kinds of canyons did. Effectively bury these kinds of dry falls (or wet fall in the case of Surprise) under a lot of sediment and smooth it into one steep gravel slope. Since they were doing mining this kind of landscape change wasn't that big a deal to them.

Storms already do this kind of thing and it is not unusual for a storm to bury what was formerly an obstacle or make a new one appear. So the mine operators would build a road and perhaps every decade or so some part of it would effectively disappear due to a storm. So they would rebuild that section, no big deal they built it that way in the first place.

It is frankly still difficult to comprehend just how much sediment these storms can move around until you visit landscapes before and after them to see for yourself.

Besides storms you get slides and falls from the canyon walls. Here is one from 2007:

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The first shot is my wife standing on the pile. The second two are taken from the top of the pile looking down each side. Best we could tell from checking with other sources this fall was at most three or four weeks old. It is a little difficult to get a sense for the scale because these are shot with an ultra-wide angle lens. In the last photo though note the greenish chock-stone over hanging over the part of the dryfall not quite buried.

Here is the same spot more recently:

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Here you can see just how huge that chockstone actually is. And the gigantic pile of rocks is gone. Where the camera is sitting in this photo would have in the past been buried under a good 15 to 20 feet of rocks.

I've seen larger changes in other canyons over the years too. Stuff gets buried and uncovered over and over again out there.

 

Surprise Canyon was a built up road at one time. To the point they dynamited parts of the canyon to build it.

Like so much in DV, eventually, nature takes over when man stops maintaining. Just look how long it’s been since the flood that damaged Scotty’s Castle and how many of those roads have been repaired. Or Saline Valley and how frequently it’s got some major issues that make it “impassible”.

 

Sediment. Beneath Badwater lies more than 11,000 feet of accumulated sediment and salts. If you dug that out, and climb to the bottom you could climb approximately 22,000 feet to the top of telescope peak!

 

Many years ago, I saw a small book by the Ridgecrest Women's garden club (or something like that) printed in the 70's, about taking the family station wagon to Panamint City for a picnic.

 

Here's something from DrivingLine that talks about Surprise Canyon. It includes an old article from 1993 Autoweek about 4x4s on the road.
As you might imagine, anyplace you can drive that's not real road has always sparked controversy. In 2007, 4x4 groups filed suit trying to re-open the canyon because they believed it was a road which had been maintained until the end of the silver mining period-the lack of maintenance turned Panamint City into a ghost town. Earthjustice and other environmental groups claimed victory even though all judgement was amounted to was kicking the can down the road claiming the plaintiff lacked standing.

You can see the trail that's available to hike today in Steve Hall's comments show some of the waterfalls along the trail on panamintcity.com. If you search for Surprise Canyon/Panamint City, you should also look at the images page for the search to gain some historical perspective.

Having the canyon open to 4x4 would be nice. But I can see how it might be considered impractical to maintain given the constant change caused by Death Valley's changing conditions.

 

The Bristolcone Pines are on my radar too. I have Digonnet's original book and Mitchell's SUV Trails. Digonnet's western side book is in my wish list queue. I like history and know what you mean about the lure of researching DV. It’s much more productive than Facebook.

 

Here's another fun trail just North of Ballarat on 178 called the Defense Mine trail . It climbs out of Panamint Valley up the Argus range to the old Defense Mine . Just a few miles North on 178 from Ballarat

You need to be locked front and rear and winch , there's a rocky sluice you've got climb but there is a bypass . There's also a section called " Floating Rock" , a large rock slab that teeters as you drive over it

The rock crawling is hard but the view of the Defense Mine is worth it . I ran this trail a few times with the CA4WDC Panamint Valley Days event in the early 90's


https://youtu.be/PTNd9Ca5a2I

 

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Those pictures are amazing. I can understand how they were able to build a road on the sediment and gravel but thinking about it washing away on a storm is somewhat mind blowing for me. Being from the South, TN, GA and now FL, I’m used to seeing erosion from our storms but it’s in dirt, clay and sand. We haul in gravel and rocks to stop or prevent it.

 

I saw the Driving Line and Steve Hall's article, that’s what started my fascination with Surprise Canyon. I’m looking at the pictures of the Jeeps clawing their way up the waterfalls and I was shaking my head trying to imagine a passable road there. Having never been there, I don’t know how I feel about the canyon being open to vehicles. In its current form, I think it’s best to just hike in. The difficulty help keep special places special.

 

This is my old 47 CJ2A Flat Fender on the Defense Mine trail

 

The middle section of the waterfalls you can still see traces of the old road

 

I think I've got a photo album with pics of my old Jeep club on the Defense mine trail , I'll have to find it and post pics !!!

 

Thousands of acres of watershed coming thru a canyon about 50' wide can move a lot of rock.

 

Just look at Odessa/Doran in Calico. What a lot of SoCal wheelers think of as "hard" used to be paved. lol

 

That picture of rocks used to be paved?????!!??!