Diet Taco... trying to keep things light

High Desert - Day 3
July 2019

My last full day in the desert I made a more leisurely departure from Barstow as I wasn't going to attempt a sunrise photo due to cloud cover. After a sit-down breakfast I hit the road with goals for today mostly being short drives off of the I-15 on the way up to Vegas.

First stop was a small graveyard on the edge of Yermo. It isn't clear to me why this site was chosen way back when and there are just a handful of graves along the low ridge.

Yermo Cemetery
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I watched my step carefully as this location was right on the edge of the "Yarrow Ravine Rattlesnake Habitat Area". I can't find anything about this habitat area but I did see two road runners nearby and they do find rattlesnakes to be a yummy treat!

I avoided the interstate and drove frontage roads headed north from Yermo. I passed the old Lake Dolores Waterpark which I remember from drives long ago when it was still open. It was always a pretty weird place to have a water park. It is a fenced ruin these days and there was nothing about it that made me want to attempt to trespass...

There does appear to be a new gas station going up at Harvard Rd. and so inattentive drivers will have another place to stop between Baker and Barstow if necessary.

South on Harvard Rd. I visited the Camp Cady Wildlife Area which is on the southern bank of the Mojave River quite near where old Camp Cady was and the end of the Mojave Road. Not surprisingly there were no other visitors though it looked like there was potentially an on site resident at the headquarters. There were plenty of birds here all making quite a ruckus.

Bud's Pond
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Near the parking area there are two artificial ponds that likely have a lot to do with all the bird life. Quite dark storm clouds were running north of I-15 this morning and I could hear occasional rumbles of thunder. The lack of sun kept temperatures down but the higher than typical humidity kept things feeling plenty warm. There are some structures and buildings here, some clearly still being used. There is a prominent tower structure that as best I can guess was formerly a water tower with the tank now missing.

Waterless Tower?
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After a quick walk around it was time to get back onto I-15 as the paved frontage roads stop at Harvard Rd. and I wasn't feeling like doing more dirt travel this morning just for the sake of it. The next stop was an odd ball one but a curiosity nonetheless. Across the highway from the gas station at Rasor Rd. is a nondescript little building that looks much like any other occasional support structure you might see along a cable right of way.

Communications Cable Bunker
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The building on the top is actually just an access point to a fairly large underground bunker meant to have been staffed through a nuclear war to provide support for an underground coaxial communications cable. If you've driven the Mojave Road you may remember from the guide book that portions of it follow an underground cable right of way that was put in during the cold war. This bunker at Rasor Rd. was one of the support facilities for the cable. They were intentionally located away from population centers to increase their likelihood of survival and were designed to survive a 20MT blast within 5 miles. In the foreground is the escape hatch as it was assumed the main entry would be blocked by debris from the entry shed. There are various vents and a blast detector on the site.

The cable was decommissioned in the 1990s and the sites sold off. The right of way is now used by fiber optic cable but fiber optics require far less infrastructure to support than coaxial cable did so all the various stations along the route are of no use. This particular bunker was bought by a real estate developer hoping to build it out as a shelter for wealthy clients worried about various catastrophes. Like most desert real estate boondoggles nothing came of it and the bunker is up for sale again if you want it!

Just a bit further north on I-15 is Baker where I stopped for a quick break and some gas. My next stop was just a bit further north and about 8 miles from the I-15. It was another relic of cold war era communications.

AT&T Long Lines Microwave Site
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Radio antennas dot the desert landscape but some of the earliest were built by AT&T for their Long Lines network. Post WWII not just the growth of telephone users but more importantly the growth of television and the need to distribute television shows across the nation before there were any satellites drove the need for a high bandwidth long distance network. Because of the need to build out fast and newly available RF technology in microwave bands from the war the folks at AT&T decided to build a microwave based network instead of a cable based network. Building a tower about every 30 miles was going to be a lot faster than running cables that required amplifiers every few miles and dealing with all the rights of way.

Of course it was the cold war and still early enough that one could kid themselves about having a "limited" war of some form and so this new critical infrastructure was built to survive nuclear blasts. Hence the large concrete building on site. The tower on the right is the one hosting the original AT&T network. Those sugar scoop shaped antennas (called Hogg Horns) were nearly unique to the Long Lines network and are very distinctive. If you see those at a site then you can be almost certain it is an old Long Lines site. For example the tower at the end of Owlshead Spring Road is a Long Lines repeater site as are the towers along CA-127 near Ibex Dunes and along Kelbaker Road in the Granite Mountains.

The tower on the left is more modern and shows a more typical modern microwave antenna design that is lighter and more compact while still retaining many of the advantages of the Hogg Horn. Unlike the cable bunkers that are of no use today what was a good location for a microwave site is still a good microwave site and so many of these Long Lines sites have a second life supporting modern communications infrastructure.

This site upon Turquoise Mountain was an important one as it linked multiple paths on the network rather than being a simple repeater. Pairs of horns point off in the direction of other stations. Given the cloudy, rainy and hazy weather it was hard to pick out the other stations. Mountain pass hosts one which I could pick out with binoculars. To the south by about 24 miles is another cross link station near Kelso. With the help of my IR camera cutting through the haze I could just barely photograph it (the small black patch on the ridge in the very middle of the photo, the faint path of the access road leads up the ridge):

Kelso Tower​

There is endless minutiae about Long Lines that I could bore you to death with - it was an amazing system for its day and pioneered much still used in microwave links to this day. In the end though once again fiber optics would spell the end for using microwaves for a national network. Fiber optics, though it took time to learn how to manufacture them reliably, provide insane amounts of bandwidth with very long distances between amplification points. Walk around a Long Lines site, look at what was cutting edge technology well into the 1970s and consider all this infrastructure could only handle a few thousand long distance calls and you understand why long distance service used to cost a pretty penny. Consider a fiber optic cable can support tens of millions of calls and you'll understand why long distance service is now essentially free.

I'm going to have to revisit this site on a clear day as the views are simply to die for. I could spend hours up here with binoculars and a topo map I think.

Facility with a view...
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I had a small lunch up on the peak and then headed back to the highway. The highway was having some problems however due to an accident that caused a significant fuel spill the evening before. Forewarned I already had a back up plan and just where traffic was coming to a standstill I exited and took a rather nice dirt road parallel to the I-15. I managed about 40 mph average along this and saved 10 to 15 minutes wait in traffic.

At Mountain Pass I took a brief break to check out the Long Lines site there with binoculars. At this site the distinctive Hogg Horn antennas had been removed.

For awhile the storms had been staying north of the I-15 and mostly blowing themselves out in that direction. As I left Mountain Pass though there was clearly something big building to east. I pulled over at the base of the mountain on Nipton Road to take it in.

Storm Brewing
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Based on the radar map it looked like this was going to cross the I-15 in front of me. Already on my agenda was to take Las Vegas Blvd. from Jean to Vegas rather than the highway just to get more familiar with all the frontage roads and not deal with truck traffic. As I got to Jean the storm arrived. It was quite the storm with extreme wind, very heavy rain and quite frequent and close lightning. The I-15 appeared to grind to a halt as it hit - not that I felt like driving particular fast on the frontage road I was on instead! On previous days I had ended up driving through muddy patches and so I was expecting to need to take the truck to the car wash. Soon the road went through an underpass beneath the Union Pacific railroad track and the underpass was filling with water. Between that and driving for a number of miles in a wind driven downpour I emerged with now perfectly clean sliders and mud flaps.

And that was about it for the trip. I made it to Vegas, spent the night and flew out very early the next morning.

Apologies that this may have been a rather boring trip report all together but I actually quite enjoyed my trip! Even though it was unexpectedly moist it actually added to the charm. Lots of these sites had been on my "to do" list but none of them are very compelling and I wouldn't want to waste "good weather" on them. So in the end it all worked out great.

 

I totally enjoy your photos in grayscale. not a boring trip by any means. I'm awaiting an R72 IR filter to try on some quasi-IR film, sorry now i never tried HIE.

 

Definitely not a boring report at all. Just the fact that you were there in July makes it interesting! Question - as an AT&T mobile customer, it seems that AT&T cellular signal is quite good in the desert compared to my friends with Verizon. Is that a legacy or perhaps byproduct of the pre-existing microwave infrastructure? Not the technology, but the existing tower locations, property rights, access roads for installation and maintenance, etc?

 

What film body are you using?

AT&T actually sold off most of its Long Lines sites to American Tower sometime ago so most of those are out of the equation. Most cellular backhaul is over fiber these days but out in the middle of nowhere I assume they still use microwave backhaul. I know I've seen plenty of cell towers with microwave antennas on them out there. AT&T and the other carriers also only own some of their tower sites. The trend has been for independent companies to build towers and lease them to the carriers. And going one step further those companies then hire out servicing them to very small shops consisting of just a few "independent contractors". That way when someone inevitably falls off the tower servicing it the deep pockets are well insulated from liability and the tiny corporation that hired the independent contractor just goes bankrupt and starts life anew later to escape the liability.

About ten years ago I remember Verizon was "king of the desert" as far as coverage went but yes these days I seem to get good AT&T signal all sorts of places I wouldn't expect. So my guess (and it is only that) is that the old Long Lines network and sites have had little to do with AT&T coverage in the outback these days.

Actually @Crom would be a good person to ask this! I know a few years ago at least he actually was pretty interested and knowledgeable in the various kinds of cell towers around and had a bit of a hobby paying attention to them with help from an app on his phone.

 

F2

 

He has been pretty busy lately but I did some mapping for him this summer during my first couple trips. Lots of data points recorded. When he has time he'll get it all annotated.

 

Not to get too off topic but it amazes me how varied AT&T and Verizon coverage is in rural areas. Areas south and east of the Sierra crest to Utah and Arizona seem to have excellent AT&T, but where I live it’s really weak, and we were up in Northern California last weekend with huge gaps on US101 in Mendocino and Humboldt counties. I’ll vote for the presidential candidate who makes rural cell coverage the rural electrification or postal delivery of our era. I drove miles on backroads last weekend that had mailboxes and recycling/trash wheelie bins, but no cell signal.

 

My previous reply was while at work so I didn't get to thoroughly read your report. It isn't boring at all and I'd like to visit some of those sites.

I have a personal relationship with the XB-50 program. My mother was an industrial nurse at North American back in the day and her friend, my first flight surgeon, is a retired Colonel who worked on the program. He's in his 80s now and I've lost contact with him. He is noted in Bob Hoovers book: "Flying Forever". It is an amazing read for anyone with an interest in aviation history. Before Hoover passed away he lived many years in the Palos Verdes area which is also where Col. Puskas lives. In fact I met a docent at the museum of flight at Torrance Airport who also lives up there. The docent was an aeronautical engineer who worked on many of the missile programs during the cold war. Must be a haven for those types.

Thank you for another amazing journey in the deserts of Southern California.

 

Love your trip reports so much!

 

Not a boring trip report at all! I started following your build as we have similar ideas for a light, well equipped truck for off road touring. I've stayed for the pictures and trip reports. I even have multiple google map lists saved with POI from you, @Crom, @ETAV8R and several others. I'm going to have a great off-road trip through southern California one day! LOL

 

The Desert Calls

The leaves are just starting to change which means it is open season for exploring the desert. The forecast discussion for the Death Valley area sounds delightful:

No weather impacts are expected across the region through the weekend and much of next week as a dry and fairly tranquil weather pattern holds over the region.

Although just recently there has been a cold spell and the Eureka Valley RAWS station just reported 26F as the temperature this morning!

Monday morning hopefully I'll be flying out to the truck and camped somewhere in the Lee Flat region by nightfall. Planning on visiting some new places and some old places.

In fact one of my favorite old places where I haven't been in I think about 17 years. I'll have to check the peak log when I get there to see when my last visit was. The photo I have is from before the digital era for me so no date (Fuji Velvia in a Yaschica T4):

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Sunset View
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In the end I didn't actually make it to Malpais Mesa as I'd hoped but that was OK as I ended up having a differently wonderful day instead. The rest of the trip went great too with perfect weather almost the whole time. Write up coming in not too long hopefully!

 

Know that spot well...not brave enough to post most of my pics. Tranquility base.

 

Inyos and Argus - Days 1 and 2
October 2019

The usual start - up at 4AM EDT in MD, fly across the country, get truck, get groceries, early lunch at In & Out, on the road before noon PDT. Take 160 to Pahrump with some construction delays, through Death Valley Junction, brief stop at Furnace Creek, cruise through Stovepipe, climb up Towne Pass, the always spectacular descent into Panamint Valley, brief stop at Father Crowley Point to note closure and scar from the F-18 crash and then onto camp for the night. Unbeknownst to me am spotted flying through the desert by @sawbladeduller who happens to be in the area as well. Turn off on a slow road which includes some of those awful off-camber sections that make you feel the rig is going to roll down the slope. Get to a very exposed camp while the shadows are still playing across the valley floor.

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My stomach is still on east coast time so have a delightful but simple cold early dinner taking in the view. Explore the landscape with binoculars. It is fun to follow familiar roads from above. Visibility is pretty good but not great - there have been winds not to mention fires down in the LA area.

As the sun sets and a chill comes on realize I have left my sweater back in MD. Cobble together various articles of clothing to stay comfortable. Scout out some compositions. Settle on a view of some of my favorite places with Joshua trees in the foreground. Wait for the light. The night day terminator should provide a nice splash of color in the sky.

Enchanted View
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The view here is pretty astonishing especially if you are familiar with the area and can pick out previously visited spots from afar. This is not a place to camp with any wind in the forecast though!

Slept like a log but up well before sunrise due to the time change. Decide that I'm not going to bother with a sunrise photo but instead just enjoy watching the light play across the landscape as I eat a cold breakfast. It is most definitely good to be back in the desert for another season!

Take a nap after sunrise and eventually make a lazy exit from camp later in the morning. The only real goal for the day is to hike down San Lucas Canyon. This will be a down then up hike - the kind I hate.

The road to the trailhead bends down into the bottom of the canyon before climbing up the other side to mines on the east side of Cerro Gordo. There was once a road that went all the way down the canyon from this point. It is a little bit unclear as to the status of the canyon bottom now. It is on the boundary between two wilderness areas which often means an existing road along those boundaries would not be closed. There are no markers indicating a closure but nature has mostly done the job of closing it. A few tracks do go a little way down the wash. Quickly though it becomes a route that one would be able to walk faster than drive as it would require frequent route finding on foot. Probably best to just park at the bend in the road at the head of the canyon and do it all on foot.

The weather is absolutely delightful at this elevation with a gentle breeze. Hiking downhill is of course easy and the wash bottom pretty easy walking - no deep sand or loose pea gravel to contend with. The wash makes many twists and turns but is usually rather broad. As is typical in this area there are spectacularly bent and folded strata on display in the canyon walls.

San Lucas Canyon Strata
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The goal of this hike is a spectacular dry fall where a road had once been blasted into the side of the canyon wall to bypass it. This somewhat insane route was not used for very long before it was abandoned in favor of the current route into Saline Valley down Grapevine Canyon. I was originally perplexed why anyone would try to build the road here but it became obvious that this was a nice short straight shot down from Cerro Gordo and the mines on its east side. If the road builders could overcome the one major obstacle it would be quite a bit shorter and a lot less road to maintain than going all the way over to Grapevine.

The hike is only about 3.5 miles from where the current San Lucas Canyon road dips into the canyon bottom and the dryfall with the old road cut. It is a very even 1,500 foot descent along the route. About halfway along a short dryfall section blocks any potential vehicle access should someone be foolhardy enough to try to cut some miles off the hike by navigating the canyon bottom. There isn't anything particular spectacular about the canyon along the route. It is just a nice pleasant walk much like any of the other of hundreds of canyons in the area.

Eventually the canyon narrows and becomes shady and cool. Around a bend you come to one of the craziest attempts at a road to be found. It is very difficult to try to capture this in photos, you really have to walk parts of it and take in all the angles to appreciate it.

View from dryfall down the former road cut


View up canyon from far end of road cut


View down canyon from far end of road cut
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As might be seen in the photos the builders blasted a ledge often overhung by huge rocks into the canyon wall from the mouth of the dryfall to a scree slope. Almost impossible to distinguish now they then built switchbacks down the scree slope back to bottom of the canyon. On a few of the switchbacks you can still see precariously stacked walls of rocks to support what remains of the road. It would be very difficult even on foot to descend past the blasted ledge these days though it is apparently possible without climbing gear for the brave. I'd never do it solo though.

There is a trail register here. It has a total of just about a dozen entries since 1995. Not an often visited site apparently! I eat lunch sitting on the ledge overlooking this wonder of questionable engineering and decision making. After about an hour of relaxing and scurrying about the remains of the road it is time to go.

It is afternoon by the time I start the hike back up the canyon. Did I mention I hate down then up hikes? One advantage of the later hour is that many sections of the canyon have one side in shade which makes the hiking more pleasant. About half way back up the canyon I hear a loud whine and am passed by a surprisingly large shadow. Looking up abruptly I am treated to the view of two A-10s yanking and banking their way down the canyon above my head.

Finally reaching the truck my next goal is a campsite in Panamint Valley. The drive out is easy and as it is dinner time on the east coast I decide to stop by Panamint Springs Resort for an early dinner. I love their fries and nothing beats eating on the front porch with a view of the northern Panamint Valley.

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While eating I overhear a conversation at the next table about how things have been going at PSR. Apparently while the Oasis at Furnace Creek was under construction all the tour buses were stopping at PSR for meals instead. That explained the huge tent and extra tables they had setup the last time I drove by. This was a really good thing for them because otherwise business had suffered badly when Trump was threatening to block various nationalities from visiting as PSR's business is primarily European. The earthquake scared a few people off as well and the recent accident in Rainbow Canyon (a.k.a. Star Wars Canyon) had shut down their business associated with airplane watchers. Nonetheless they felt things were going well, some of their new cabins and tent cabins are popular and they may build more as well as expand the porch permanently to the southeast.

I wasn't in much of a hurry because I figured I had plenty of time to get to Lookout Camp not very far away before sunset. This would turn out not to be the case. The road from Nadeau Trail up the wash towards Lookout is a bit of a disaster. Finally reaching a small narrows section things got worse. Something with as short a wheelbase as a Jeep would make short work of it. The Tacoma could certainly do it as well with care. But late in the day solo and with no spotter it seems foolhardy to attempt it. So I retreat and accept that I'll have no sunset photo today.

Backtracking I eventually find a nice spot on a lower ridge in the fading twilight. Setup camp quickly and pass out after a little bit of reading. It had been a pretty satisfying day altogether.

 

Enjoyed the read.

 

..i was looking for a site to camp, had just read a blog mentioning a 'silver stake' near a J-tree as a start for a cross country walk to an Indigenous rock art site on Lee flat. drove slow over a rough spur trail toward the Nelson escarpment, a random choice, found a 3 inch aluminum pipe placed near a J-tree and a fire ring of rocks. set camp. sitting in chair, jotting notes, and viewing over Lee Flat toward the Santa Rosa hills, i spotted a white Tacoma with white camper leading a dust trail, knowing instantly it was @DVexile, remembering a mention by @Crom of how he followed, lagging behind, as @DVexile danced his truck so quickly over the road. i walked to the rock art next morning then headed out toward another unfound rock art site.

 

Inyos and Argus - Day 3
October 2019

I woke up rather early again still being on east coast time. The previous evening while I had given up on a sunset shot I was careful to find a spot that would probably have a favorable sunrise. The forecast was for some high cirrus to come through which could make for some nice color. In the middle of the night I had been up for a few minutes and in fact bands of cirrus were blowing over.

I checked the time and there was no real reason to rush based on when light should hit the clouds. I climbed out of the back of the truck to eat breakfast and walk around but was surprised to see the horizon with an intensely deep red color. My brain sort of recalled having seen this once or twice before but always only bleary eyed in cold weather after which I just burrowed deeper into my sleeping bag. More conscious this time I was intrigued. Looking at the cirrus to the north I was a bit shocked to see they had a hint of color to them. Given how dim the lighting was I knew there was actually more color than my eyes could see. I checked the time. I double checked sunrise on my GPS app. None of this made sense, there was no way sunlight could be hitting those clouds. They should get lit up about 15 minutes before local sunrise and it was presently 30 minutes before local sunrise.

Well, whatever, rather than standing there pondering celestial geometry it was clearly time to setup the tripod and take pictures. Exposure times were very long in this deep twilight. I took multiple exposures to average in post to reduce noise and to smear out the moving clouds even more as a single exposure was long enough to give them an unsatisfying amount of just barely blurred. Chimping the exposures on the LCD on the camera did in fact show there was spectacular color up there even though the light level was too low for my eyes to perceive it.

Perplexing Sunrise
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This was on oddly intense color with a deep blue sky. I've been able to get a similar effect in a "normal" sunrise using a polarizer which darkens the blue parts of the sky but usually results in an unnatural look. These cirrus were quite thin so the amount of color in these shots is pretty astounding. Soon the color faded and yet it was still many minutes until what would be the expected time for sky color.

Following where this odd light was going to head next I turned around to face the Argus range behind me to the west. The slopes were illuminated in an ethereal light with cirrus clouds sweeping rapidly overhead backlit by a nearly full moon. Again multiple long exposures blended into a single very long exposure to get very blurred streaks of clouds.

Argus Twilight​

And then a handful of minutes later, now about 15 minutes before local sunrise, the "usual" sunrise sequence played out as expected. The cirrus to the north were hit with another splash of color, brighter but less intense this time. The eastern horizon turned the usual bright pinkish orange instead of the earlier eerie blood red of the unusual "first" sunrise. The night-day terminator descended across the sky to the west. I had been bizarrely treated to two sunrises this morning!

Later in the day thinking it through and then running an online distance to horizon calculator to double check I figured out what had happened.

Usually color in high cirrus clouds at say 40,000 feet happens at the time of local sunrise about 250 miles away from you. This is because the those high clouds see the sunrise much earlier than the ground below them something anyone who has been on a plane flight at sunrise or sunset knows well. If you use a distance to horizon calculator you'll see that from 40,000 feet the apparent horizon is about 250 miles away.

At our latitude the sun appears to travel over the ground at about 15 miles per minute. And so that 250 mile difference in apparent sunrise location translates to about 16 minutes. Thus most photographers know that high clouds will typically turn to fire about 15 minutes before/after the local sunrise/sunset. This is why when it was 30 minutes before sunrise I wasn't expecting anything to be going on.

What happened this morning though was there must have been another band of cirrus clouds about 500 miles to the east. Thus 30 minutes before my local sunrise those cirrus clouds 500 miles to the west were lit up with the usual morning fire. Importantly though there also must have been few other clouds between me and those distant clouds so that the light raking the bottom of them had a clear path through the atmosphere all the way to the band of clouds right above me. This assumed band of clouds 500 miles easy had acted like a gigantic photographers bounce reflector.

Better still this bounced light had traveled through way more atmosphere than usual before hitting the clouds above me - about twice as much in fact. It is atmospheric scattering of blue light leaving only the redder colors behind that gives twilight its magical pinkish glow. In this case the effect was doubled resulting in that blood red horizon and overly colored thin cirrus above me.

The Bounced Double Sunrise ​

So if I had been in a balloon at 40,000 feet instead of just seeing the reddish sun pop above the horizon at 15 minutes before local sunrise at sea level I would have even earlier at about 30 minutes before local sunrise at sea level seen the horizon turn into a brilliant band of deep red as the just barely visible cirrus 500 miles east caught their morning light.

It was a pretty amazing thing to view and then eventually figure out the mystery of. But I digress...

With both sunrises now over it was time to plan out the day. I was planning on doing mostly vehicular exploration and then camping at the base of Malpais Mesa with the intention of hiking up to it the next morning potentially in the dark. With no sweater along not to mention a fair bit of wind forecast for the next morning this was seeming unappealing.

I had recently learned that my brother's ever changing schedule was going to have him arriving in Vegas the next morning with an entirely free day. He is always trying but failing to make it out on one of my trips. This seemed like a perfect time to adapt the schedule. I'd still explore by vehicle today but instead of freezing my tail off trying to climb Malpais Mesa the next morning I would spend the night in Vegas and do a day trip with my brother.

There were some roads around Darwin I've always been meaning to check out and so today would be a great occasion for that. I took on some more gas at Panamint Springs - the prices were actually surprisingly competitive. And then began to take what the locals call "the back way to Darwin". I noted some decent sheltered camping spots should I be hiding from the wind at some point in the future. As the climb continued the views steadily improved.

Argus Explorations
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This might be my new favorite Diet Taco out exploring shot...

There are a number mines in the area that could be explored and a few crazy side roads to them that I did not have the stomach to drive down. There also happens to be some water in the area.

Unexpected Delight
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Like most areas with water around here it is accompanied by quite a bit of burro dung which detracts significantly from its appeal as a camping spot. Not to mention what I must assume are prodigious populations of insects at various times of the year.

I had been hoping to find a particularly photogenic old car along the roads up this way but either it has been removed or more likely was just down some side road I did not explore. No worries though as one of my side road excursions took me to a winning view that I may need to revisit someday for a sunset shot.

Argus Vista
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I trundled through Darwin which I don't think I've driven through in about two decades. It is a place seemingly popular with folks taking carefully cropped photos of its "charm" but to be honest it doesn't look appealing at all. Like many such places in the desert it is difficult to distinguish parts of it from an automotive recycling yard. Further north out of town you pass an extensive array of decaying buildings up slope which I believe were part of the company town as it were when the mine was more active.

Soon the road crests a low rise and you are treated to an enchanting view of the southern Sierra behind a plateau of sparse Joshua trees.

Leaving Darwin
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I spent a bit more time exploring a few mining sites in the area along the 190 corridor. None were much to write home about. To be honest I'm getting a bit fatigued of mining ruins though of course there are various special ones that are still fun to visit.

Now on the edge of the Owens Valley I was looking at a fairly long drive back to Vegas. This was suppose to be a vacation and I suspected the next day out with my brother would be a lot of driving so I decided to start making my way back a bit early and to take it leisurely. It was around lunch time and I so rarely get to eat at Panamint Springs that I thought what the heck why not stop by again.

A meal worth having twice...
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The rest of the drive was uneventful. The whole route is almost starting to feel like a familiar commute I've done it so many times and thankfully pretty often these days as well. I made into Vegas without incident and started planning out the next day's impromptu trip with my brother.

 

Nice pictures, Ken! For an engineer you’re a pretty good astronomer/astrophysicist, or maybe I should say you’re clever about celestial geometry. But one question: I’m familiar with old-school pushing film speed and burning or dodging printing exposures, but what the heck is “chimping exposures on the LCD”? Were you monkeying around with them, or was that just auto-correct? And by the way, was that place with water at the springs above the falls?

 

Oh, sorry "chimping" just means checking what you got on the LCD. It's a sort of derogatory term. Especially in fast moving situations you'll often see people staring at the picture they just got instead of paying attention to what is going on in front of them. Wikipedia has a pretty good description of the origin of the term:

The term 'chimping' was first written about by Robert Deutsch, a USA Today staff photographer, in September 1999 when writing a story for the SportsShooter email newsletter. He did not invent the term but heard it passed down by word of mouth.

The term derives from the habit of the photographer looking at the picture in the LCD, and saying "Ooh, ooh, ooh!" imitating the sound of a chimpanzee.​

For a landscape shooter checking the last shot on the LCD is pretty useful for checking critical focus in low light, on many cameras to actually see RGB histograms of the exposure instead of just luminance histograms available during live view and in this particular case to actually see what kind of color is going on in low light when it is so dim our cones aren't very active.

And yep the water is further up canyon from the falls.

Thanks for the compliments by the way!