Death Valley Off-Road Adventures

I also made a post about at the SPA

 

SXS owners going out of their way to make everyone across the country hate them.

 

I found and friends reported for me, a guy on BLM land at Pisgah Crater who set up a AirBnB. The thing that tipped me over the edge was him putting in a pit toilet for his guests.

And I had an incident with a douchebag rock climber that has scared me from ever wanting to return to Alabama Hills. Maybe I need to volunteer to go to Mars as it will take a long time for the douchebags to invade that planet.

 

What the f?

 

I am a person who prides him or herself on that fact that I've never knowingly driven off-trail on our public lands, or participated in the types of problematic and/or illegal off-road motorized exploration popularized in today's social media. That doesn't mean I'm without blame either, and in the grand scheme of things, I'm probably part of the problem, as a prolific contributor to this and other internet forum threads.

Narrator: @mk5 lives in a basement and has never meaningfully contributed to this or any other internet forum.

But I just wanted to pose the question, if the law is suddenly being enforced in such remote places as Alabama Hills, where can the rest of us exercise our constitutional right to drunkenly drive our trucks over petroglyphs while shooting unregistered firearms in the direction of our auditory hallucinations?

(Asking for a friend.)

Sorry folks this was my attempt at a joke, I'm stuck at home for the next 6 weeks, please keep posting pictures from Death Valley!

 

I’m not sure there is any truly safe place for a patriot now that they’ve got that Jewish space laser.

 

I was severely disappointed to find one of the more remote dune systems in the park with fresh ATV tracks all over it a while ago. At least the dunes get wiped clean after a windstorm unlike the the dry lake beds, but it made me mad. The miles of tire tracks to get to and around the dune vicinity will not get erased as easily.

 

Not sure if it was sarcasm or not but AH isn't remote by any means.

 

Dune Grass, Primrose, and a couple of other plants live in the dunes-you might not notice the tracks but the ATV may destroy some of that. And the grasses are what hold the tops of the dunes.

It's a journey that didn't end in a hotel parking lot

 

Not an issue in the desert, fortunately, since the space lasers are only used by PG&E, not SoCalEdison or DWP. Yet.

 

Yep, the visible damage will be gone in the next windstorm. The damage to the plants that hold the dunes together is harder to see and lasts longer.

Some idiots scrawled out racial epithets in 6’ high letters in the sand as well. Might or might not have been the ATVs. Looked like it from the tracks.

Don’t even get me started on some of the other illegal things seen in the desert parks in the last couple years like fireworks, wildlife poaching, dune boarding, toilet paper, graffiti, human waste, dogs...

 

All jokes aside, as a person who has worked in related fields for many years, few things boil my blood more than seeing how many people fall for conspiracies that powerful space lasers suddenly already exist. No, they don't---they're still way too expensive! We need to make them lighter and more efficient! KEEP FUNDING THE RESEARCH, SHEEPLE!!!

 

Don't lie to us. That's what really downed that Super Hornet in 2019

 

Not a DV trip, but since I know many of us like the area in general... we were down in the MNP for a week, and I'm starting the story. I won't post too much about it here unless folks want me to (since it's not in the park), but it'll be in my build thread as usual.

A Tough Year at Alaska Hill - Mojave 2020 #1​

More pics and the story:
A Tough Year at Alaska Hill - Mojave 2020 #1​

 

The jetski of the desert, ugh...

 

https://sierrawave.net/canyoneering-fatality-from-fall-in-death-valley-national-park/

 

Damn. Must have been a difficult decision to leave their friend but it was the right thing to do.

 

Sad to hear. There is so much sketchy rock in many DV canyons it is easy to understand how this happens. I’m always quite nervous above a canyon floor like when doing a fall bypass. I’ve had so many things shift under my foot or fall apart in my hand. I try to stay where the worst that could happen is a long slide down a slope and am very uncomfortable close to any real exposure.

Doing a loop including Lost Burro Peak getting up the head of the canyon was way worse than I expected and I had one spot with really poor rock and more exposure than I like. Then I had a rock crumble in my hand and a foot start slipping at the same time. I hauled myself up with my legs doing the whole roadrunner thing and then plunked myself down and shook for a good minute. Thing is having been around climbers and canyoneers I pretty sure that scare for me would be just a routine thing that happens multiple times a trip to them. Real easy to get into a whole “normalization of deviance” kind of mind set I imagine.

 

I just saw this in my Facebook ad feed:
https://www.outsideonline.com/2418905/how-side-sides-are-redefining-adventure?fbclid=IwAR0WsEBtVTQ8rzkR1GQESWq9_47zsExPcAB89IJyAkIUKv0ad4tCVW2Sr6s%2Baem_AYnI6YIJaU4t1_kTVuIMkZOEWXdLuygaNRsdODrSdtm-q8MmS82XS8COfe62Ad45-limZBFJAYG0BPm-KqNGqB0-bRZWD0NfJXaexII4Lmh9VEkF-egphpq2e2IBqbazdPE

Outside Magazine has sunk pretty low with these advertorials. I’m sure Jon Krakauer, Tim McCahill, David Quammen and the other great writers from their early days wish they’d never helped spawn this beast. The comments on the Facebook post are overwhelmingly negative, but hey, Outside already got the ad revenue from BRP (CanAm) and Facebook got the ad revenue from Outside. Sigh ...

 

As a climber who's been involved in multiple rescues and recoveries it reads to me like he was already deceased. They acted in the best interest of the remaining party members in an active rock fall zone. It sucks loosing a friend but it sucks worse loosing more then one. They made a very hard call and they made it correctly.