Death Valley Off-Road Adventures

Rainy days in the park sure do make the colors pop.

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Still trying to figure out the story with these circles out in the desert. Definitely very suspicious observations this time around...

The one by the Ibex Spring turnoff was protected by some sort of force field that broke my camera:



The one by Evelyn had an even crazier force field that somehow made my wife very irritated at me.



As a result, no other circles were investigated on this trip.

 

Some photos from a rainy trip to DV...


A not entirely dry Broadwell Lake

Started by chasing the route of the T&T from Ludlow to Shoshone. Very little of the grade is drivable, but most of it is easy to follow, save for Soda Springs which is fenced off by ass holes, and Amargosa Valley which is wilderness. Some stretches still have the ties in place.



Near here is a fun piece of art on a hilltop





One must divert several miles in either direction for a grade crossing of the UP line at Crucero. Lame.



(I don't think it's a good idea to drive over railroad tracks without a grade crossing?)



I picked west, and had to drive all the way to the mouth of Afton Canyon.



Hey look, there was a Tacoma out there! Funny how you don't notice things until looking at the pictures. What I did notice was water in the normally dry bed of the Mojave. I'd missed the rain by several hours so it was only a trickle.



That was it for daylight... and we had chased the grade from Baker to Shoshone via Sperry Wash last winter. Maybe next time I'll chase the rest of it from DVJ to Beatty.

Hey does anyone know what these are?



Me neither.



Speaking of details missed until looking at photos... I guess I could have peered into this one. Doh!



My theory is that they're full of skittles.

 

Nice. When we followed dirt road next to the rail grade (we also chose west), I had to speed up a bit when a minivan doing 55mph on the gravel next to the tracks passed us. #InsecureTacoma

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Did you notice any of the old etchings on rocks near the "how dare you call it artwork...that's a real, live, military communication device"? How about the elusive Mojave Jackalope?

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Yeah you can drive a lot faster on the railroad-maintained graded roads than the lumpy dirt trails paralleling them. Probably illegal, but I've never been called out on it.

I just googled the art installation... nice. The masses are nothing if not creative.

I missed the tin building, we were in kind of a hurry for dinner reservations and I'd spent all afternoon putzing around Ludlow on a Zoom call... no cell signal past the power lines. But did stop to check out the Bacon Strip. Even tuned in ctaf. Nothing.



Someday I'll get a plane. For now I can try to have fun and not worry though.

Guess I'm half-assing a trip report. Someday maybe I'll repost these pictures on my build thread with dozens more and a long-winded narrative about railroad history.

Anyway, this place was seriously amazing:







Shoshone is great, day or night.





I had been wondering if this place was named for the tool, or as a drinking establishment for birds. The tool hanging behind the bar suggested the former... but this bird opined otherwise as he ate all the squished bugs out of my grill while I gassed up:



Thanks buddy!







I was driving from an old topo map that showed West Side Road connecting to the highway south of Ashford Mill, which led to some confusion... and a visit to the mill site.



Then on a whim I drove up towards Ashford... a fun drive but kind of a bust, because the road ends at wilderness well prior to the site on my map. Too rainy to hike today. But presumably there's a mine up there, to feed that mill down in the valley?



Eventually I found West Side Road. The Amargosa was flowing. As was the traffic. Holiday weekend. Look close, there's like a dozen oncoming cars here.



But soon there seemed to be more water on the road than there had been in the river.



And here's the shitty part about that... the vast majority of traffic was apparently forging illegal bypasses around each puddle. All the fresh tire tracks left the road.



This is why NPS closes roads on us. Not to claim I was doing the road any favor by driving it in its flooded state, but there is no excuse to illegally drive off road in Death Valley. Well maybe there are, but a shallow puddle isn't one of them. There was ample traction in 2WD, and the deepest puddles didn't even reach the hubs.

Anyway, I tried not to worry, and randomly picked another mine to explore. Rain kept getting worse.



Met a friendly guy named Chad camped up there in a classic Ford truck with a camper. He mentioned there was a visitor log in one of the buildings... but I couldn't find it. Not that I looked very hard... it was raining just as hard inside as outside. Nothing like the smell of soggy wood and mouse poop.



Once again, reviewing photos at home reveals details missed while taking them. I'm guessing that's the log book in the plastic tub.



The mine was big but not particularly noteworthy. Well, except for the fact that, while it was 45 degrees and raining sideways outside, it was a blissfully calm and dry ~60 within the mine. The normally creepy feeling of poking around in a dark mine was replaced by welcome comfort.



The downpour let up around sunset. Wish Id've brought some skis for the fields of snow on the valley floor.

 

Looks like a network of monitor wells to gauge depth to groundwater.

You could look at websites such as USGS, California DWR, or GeoTracker to investigate further based on the well locations.

 

I'm just going to take the time to point that, while very useful, trying to find the information you need (in my case, groundwater depth/elevation) is often maddeningly inefficient on GeoTracker.

 

Depth of groundwater or the plume of something else. In my city, there was a dry cleaner that had been in business for a long time. The property was purchased for redevelopment and gone through several changes of ownership before this huge plume of whatever chemicals they'd used in the past was discovered. There are monitoring wells in the area. Same with a company that manufactured road flares and so on.

I am amazed by how much they can track using these monitoring wells.

 

There a something similar out on the black rock playa that is used to monitor air quality.

 

The Mole People!

 

I'm with you on the driving around the puddles - damn people, we're gonna lose a lot of access to places with that kind of shenanigans.

Your bird reminds me of a story I heard from a guy that grew up in the middle of nowhere Nevada. His family ran a gas station and restaurant where it was "Next Gas 75 miles" each way. Out of boredom he got into bird watching and noticed that the birds clearly knew which grills to prioritize for the freshest bugs. Those at the gas pumps were picked over immediately while the cars parked in front of the restaurant could wait until no cars were at the pumps. The birds would actually leave cars parked at the restaurant and head for any new arrivals at the pumps and then return to the restaurant when the newly topped up cars headed down the road. Once a week they knew to go over to the old garbage truck that only moved on Thursdays.

 

Sounds like the seagulls that show up on schedule around the end of Giants home games.

 

Looks like the last place on earth that would have ANY groundwater

 

There's a substantial aquifer under DV

 

Wrap the camera in tin foil. That should fix the issue

 

I'll admit, although I'm still hoping they're just tubes filled with skittles, they do appear intended for monitoring groundwater or other underground geological properties. What confuses me here is their density in this area... four in the above photograph, and several others noted working our way north from the lakebed. And I was on a Zoom call for work the whole time, so I probably missed a bunch.

Perhaps they are monitoring a plume of something... although what, I can't imagine. AFAIK this is a small endorheic watershed that hasn't experienced a historical ecological disaster. A brief google search found only the following:

Now that's more like it, guys. Mole people and tin-foil hats, that's what I'm looking for here. Oh, and skittles.



OK, more photos!

We met up with the in-laws at PSR. The most "rustic" accommodations of the three-night trip, but I love PSR and it's always a great time!



It sprinkled on us a few times in the evening, but the skies finally opened up around midnight. Or 10, or 2AM, or whenever we went to bed, I forget. I drank half a growler of beer from Tecopa (DV brewing) and it was fantastic -- so much so in fact I took the long way home to refill it!



After breakfast we set out for Darwin via the old toll road, hoping to see the falls. I raced past the packed parking lot at the trailhead, smugly confident that the hike from the opposite side would be better. I don't know what kind of idiot can so thoroughly study an area on satellite maps, yet still conclude that the falls would flow towards Darwin, even while passing the first trailhead on a steep incline... But I guess I'm that kind of idiot. So onward we drove.



But then, holy cow, there were so many mines up on the hills! The more you look, the more you see. It's rare that I find my camera and its optics inadequate, but it was in this case. Here are some crappy crop-zooms from the above shot though:



Hand-built roads at the bottom of the water slide!



A ladder to adventure!!!



A series of tubes -- what more could you want?!?

OK, how about this mysterious slot in the hill, which came into view just around the bend:



We all decided it was time to go explore mining stuff. We soon arrived at an ore bin.



And just above it... I don't know, some sort of cistern? What even is this?



IT PUTS THE LOTION ON ITS SKIN



A bit further on we saw some mine stuff accessible up a steep side-road... a very steep road. The Ford made the wiser call to hang out below with binoculars. I don't know if you'll be able to see it as uploaded, but there's a most curious parallel row of rocks marking a pathway down the hill (left center). But that slope is entirely too steep to walk. Wonder what the story is there!



Load'er up!



Whatever they were mining here... it was very sparkly.



There was more fun around the other side of the hill...



Including a rusty cable leading to... definitely somewhere!



Wow, so much of mining stuff!!!

When we got back down to the valley, the road to China Garden was completely washed out. Like, gone without a trace, for its entire length. Normally I wouldn't drive down a valley in the absence of a road, but in this case I was 99.9% sure we're allowed to drive to China Garden, so I shoveled a ramp down the three-foot step at the edge of the washout and forged ahead to see if we could get there.



No problem there, so I doubled back to fetch the other vehicle and we made our way down to ... what I thought was the superior trailhead for seeing Darwin Falls.



I wasn't sure if we could drive beyond China Garden, though. Areal imagery had shown well-worn tire tracks beyond this barrier... but it is a barrier. Floods had washed away all prior tire tracks, signage, and at least part of this barrier... I decided to park here -- wouldn't want to be the guy that forges first tracks on an illegal route. It was a nice hike made even nicer by all the extra hiking.



However, we totally failed to reach the falls. I'm sure you could get there, but it wasn't going to be an easy foot trail. And the wrong side in either case. My bad! Still it was fun to be out on foot. Like most of the desert, even when wet, it wasn't muddy.

Ice halos are somewhat rare in SoCal, so I butchered this shot in photoshop to ruin it for you. Make sure to like and subscribe.



By then other vehicles were arriving, and the randomly chosen route had become a prominent de-facto roadway until next time it floods. So either "you're welcome" or "I'm sorry."

I had forgotten to make dinner reservations until the day before, so the only slot left was 5:15PM. We were already behind schedule. Had to rush through Darwin.



How many names has this place had? I was hoping it might presently be a Gucci store -- I had stepped in a puddle and was looking for new shoes. But I couldn't risk encountering a large quantity of peanut butter here.



Nice.



Our only glimpse of the Sierras... soon followed by a commanding view of the Panamints.



Sticking with the theme of commanding views...



From here I could see our next destination:



More specifically:



Yep. Dinner reservations there in about an hour. Probably time to hit the road.

But time management isn't really my thing, so first I wanted to check out this long-closed road:



This road used to be a through-route, along which one could connect from Panamint Valley to Death Valley via Trail Canyon. How amazing would it be to have another route over the Panamints? Especially a sketchy-ass shelf road like this?



Of course, it washed out decades ago, so you couldn't drive it even if the park service hadn't erected the gate. But believe it or not, it's actually cherry-stemmed through the wilderness, so I can still daydream about someday driving this route.



(green = wilderness)



Not that there's a realistic hope for that ever happening, though. There are plenty of non-wilderness roads in far-better condition that NPS keeps off-limits. And while it's laughably implausible that park management would ever move to re-open the route, it's entirely certain that the Sierra Club would sue them to death for even thinking about it.

Anyway we made it to dinner with a minute to spare, so I'll call the whole day a smashing success. Sorry for the super-long post, but it's more fun rambling here than on my own thread.

 

Thanks, I enjoy the running commentary and explanation of what we are looking at.

 

You're in trouble! The force field somehow attached to me and my wife has been irritated at me since.....its been 15 years

 

We really were so close. Here's what I've drafted for my (significantly less entertaining) trip report.

Having gotten horizontal before just after 6:00pm the previous evening, I figured it wouldn't be hard to get up by 5:00am and hoof it a few miles up the North Fork of Trail Canyon - to Aguereberry Point - in order to capture some sunrise photos.

Right.

Fumbling frantically for the "turn off you stupid thing," button when my alarm went off, we proceeded to sleep another two hours until our internal alarms - err, bladders - just couldn't take it anymore.

With 13 hours of sleep we were doing a great job wasting precious daylight and falling even further behind schedule.​

 

Reads like a part of a mystery novel.