Death Valley Off-Road Adventures

I saw the post not too long ago. Seemed to me like he was really just trying to promote himself.

 

I heard that the hotel/bar in Cerro Gordo burned to the ground last night.
I am bummed as a great deal of history is lost. What a shame.

 

whoa what?!???? any idea of cause?

 

Not yet. Will talk to my buddy in a bit and find out more.

 

It wasn't natural. There was zero thunderstorm activity here last night.

 

That is a great deal of history lost.

I hope it wasn't illegal campers.

 

Nobody is talking just yet.

That was the last building you would want to lose.

 

fuck. that is devastating

 

Well, shit.

The only time I was there was just before it sold and they weren't giving tours so I only got to drive by.

 

Ugh... sad news.

 

From another site sounds like the caretaker and some of the new owners were on site at the time of the fire. Electrical fire suspected at this point.

 

Damn that is such a shame. So much history lost.











I was looking forward to coming back someday and staying there... I heard they were seeking to get it running it as a hotel again.

Edit: They're running a GoFundMe to rebuild, which suggests to me that this was an uninsured or underinsured loss

 

Can't find any more details in the news, but bizarrely, this full length article came out just today in the NY times:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/style/ghost-town-vacations.html

That room in the first photo was a card table room, behind the bar, and had a recreated bullet hole in the wall behind the subject from an infamous shooting that once happened there. It is definitely no more.


Edit: the photo below appeared in the LA times on 6/21.

 

Terrible news. Glad that nobody got hurt though.

 

Heard the news this morning. Effing tragic.

 

Really sad to hear this. I had planned to drive up there at end of March but then the stay in place orders postponed that trip. Hope the new owner can rebuild , double hope the county allows him to rebuild.

 

Not exactly on topic, but folks in this thread seem to be generally well-read and seemingly like-minded to the type of travel I do... (and hey, I'm asking about something nearby to DV )

Nevada. Are there any good books (of the Digonett variety) for the state (or areas of the state) that folks would recommend? I've not done much exploration there, but it seems like there's bound to be a lot of great desert/ghost towns/mines to explore/hike.

Naturally I've done internet searching and have perused the various nevadaghosttown and "backcountry" sites, but those don't hold a candle to the detail in Digonett's texts.

 

I would recommend Stanley Paher's books for Nevada ghost towning/exploring. He has several out, but I would purchase Nevada Ghost Towns & Mining Camps, 1970.

 

So this is neither on topic nor an answer to your question, as it is in southern California... but I've been meaning to report somewhere that I had a ton of fun on the Bradshaw trail the other week, following Ross's "The Gold Road to La Paz." This route is like a Mojave Road of the Colorado Desert, and having a guide book on par with Casebier's MT guide gave us the same level of engagement with the history and geology on the drive. Highly recommended!



I've been sitting on a half written trip report for a month now, which suggests it will never get finished like so many others. So here are some cliff notes and some photos -- hope that's okay to post on the DV thread!







The bradshaw trail itself is a somewhat boring graded road that you could race across in half a day. But the side trails are absolutely fantastic, all of them, with a good mix of technical driving, mining history, native history, and geology (especially if you want to dig up geodes south of Wileys Well!)





Two days and two nights on the trail felt well-paced for my wife, but rushed for me. The guide book is thorough, but doesn't include sufficiently detailed maps for navigation, nor does it include any lat/lon waypoints. So I would recommend doing some proper route planning (which I know Dan does anyway -- I periodically look at his how-tos and wish I was that organized).



But alas, my route planning strategy is to commit a general plan to memory before the trip, then improvise with maps in hand on the trail. This backfires more often than not when I inevitably wind up with inadequate maps (or sometimes none at all!) Luckily, I think being lost is fun (at least for a while), and so far, I'm really good at reckoning my way to the destination by memory or by luck. This time I pre downloaded topos and areal imagery to BCN on my head unit, and I have the whole state on BCN XE on my phone, yet BOTH inexplicably failed me trying to loop back from Augustine Pass. It was a bizarre failure of technology, but we actually had a ton of fun driving around in dead-end canyons and old mining sites, and eventually resorted to (gasp) zeroing the trip odometer and following the turn-by-turn instructions in the book, which totally worked!



I would recommend this for late fall to early spring--even going in late May (delayed by the lockdown) gave us triple digit highs every day. Also, yellowjackets were a problem from dawn to late afternoon, literally everywhere we stopped. But evenings and nights were beautiful and eventually downright pleasant, and despite the daytime heat, we had some awesome short hikes. And we still managed to dig up some neat looking Geodes and rocks at the Hauser Beds, even though the heat limited us to a couple 20 minute sessions.








Random lesson learned: It is awesome to shower off at camp after a hot day on the trail, but even with heated water and evening air temps in the low 90s, I quickly learned that standing wet and unclothed in 20+ mph dry desert winds is absolutely insanely unbelievably shockingly painfully freezing cold!

Editing to add: We saw tons of small wildlife on this trip, day and night! Even saw a gigantic Chuckwalla saunter across the trail, and a 4-foot long snake, but both out of range for my cellphone camera. Here's what I could corner for a close up:


Scorpion, unknown (to me) species


Kangaroo mouse


Desert iguana

 

Nice write up!