Mar. 1, Monday
On this day Matt returned to New York. To everyone's further disappointment, it fell out that Lukman would be unable to accompany Patrice and I to Death Valley (Backcountry Hikes). Patrice and I drove to Baker, California, home of the world's tallest thermometer, Mad Greek Cafe, and Bun Boy, mere spitting distance from the entrance to Death Valley National Park. Note: the total drive-time between San Diego and the Furnace Creek visitor's station, taking the route through Baker, which I think is probably best, should not exceed 4.5-5 hours.

Mar. 2, Tuesday; Day 1
We entered the park and were at the Furnace Creek visitor's center by around 9 AM. Our first move was to seek advice and useful information from a backcountry ranger. Here are some of the useful things we learned:

• In Death Valley, NP, backcountry permits are free and voluntary: you don't need them, but they are a courtesy and possibly a safety measure.
• In Death Valley, unless areas are otherwise designated, you can backcountry camp in them, subject to the rule that you cannot camp within two miles of a paved road. Even in wilderness areas you may camp within 50 feet of an unpaved road. From this results a rule of thumb: you can always car camp more than two miles down a dirt road, so should never, ever, camp in the car-campsites provided by the NPS (unless the area is designated "day-use only") -- this is especially useful on first and last nights in the park.
• Many of the Park's dirt roads are navigable with a normal, low-clearance passenger car, but many require high-clearance and four-wheel drive. Having the latter capabilities will definitely open up more of the Park to exploration.
• There are very few marked and maintained trails in the Park. When not explicitly following a canyon, most "trails" really involve sighting a distant landmark as a goal and heading vaguely in its direction.
• Do not speed in the Park. The Pigs are watching.

For our first venture, we decided to hike eight miles to Indian Pass and camp there for the night, leaving our car about six miles north of the visitor center, right on Highway 190. We chose Indian Pass because our map showed a spring not far from the end of the eight mile trail. It is a pass through the Amargosa Mountain Range, which lie along the California-Nevada border and separate Death Valley from the Amargosa Desert.

It was not long before midday that we finally hit the trail. We were not certain that we started from the right place, nor that we were headed for the correct low point of the Funeral Mountains (part of the Amargosa Range). We began our hike in the hottest part of the day. We were carrying heavy packs, loaded with nine liters of water, which we had hoped would be sufficient for our needs even if we did not find the spring (although under that circumstance we would not be able to use water for cooking for our dinner). After about four miles, we found shelter in the low shadow of an erosion gully, and crouched there to eat our lunch and allow the day to cool off a little.

From where we stopped to eat and rest, our chosen course would begin rising in elevation much more rapidly than had the ground we had theretofore covered. After our rest, we left our packs in the shade, and scouted the trail a bit. We covered perhaps another half-mile, then climbed a promontory. Truly, we had no reason to believe we were headed for the right part of the mountain range. Therefore we decided that in our planning we should not assume we would find a source of water. We also realized that we were drinking water quite a bit faster than anticipated, in the (extrapolated) range of three liters per day each, or more -- and needing every drop. Deciding that we valued a hot dinner and wet throats more than achieving our self-assigned goal of reaching Indian Pass, we elected to turn back.

Upon reaching our packs, when Patrice bent to lift hers ...[X-rated portion deleted]... a benediction, as first fruits for the desert spirits.

We hiked back to the road, and then I ran to get the car, about half a mile away. I picked up Patrice and the packs, and we drove a good hour to a dirt road (Big Four Mine Road) in the west of the park, near the settlement of Panamint Springs. We drove a few miles down this road, and then put up a tent about fifty feet from the road (this being a designated wilderness area).

We knew that tonight would be the first actually full moon, and we were looking forward to it. However, as sunset approached and temperatures in the great flat bowl in which we were camping dropped, a strong nightwind began to rise, which essentially drove us to the shelter of our tent not long after we finished our meal. At these latitudes, moonrise was not for an hour after sunset, and so our experience of it was more or less as a spotlight piercing the walls of our tent while we listened to the howling of the winds.

Mar. 3, Tuesday; Day 2
When we awoke, new tracks indicated that a coyote had investigated us during the night; apparently she found nothing to sustain her curiosity, for although her path intersected our cooking area, she left no sign of having loitered.

The Panamint Dunes, apparently "the most secluded dune field in the park," lie about a four mile hike from the point on Big Four Mine Road closest to them. We added about a mile and a half both ways to that by walking that distance along the road to get to that closest point, thus making an eight mile day into an eleven mile day. Actually, we added still a greater distance to the ground we covered by experimenting with the misleading appearance of distance: the foothills of the mountains to our northeast appeared to lie about three or four hundred yards from the road we were walking along; we walked perhaps a mile to reach their barest beginnings. We carried no packs, and only brought four liters of water (all of which we drank on the hike).

The walk was long and hot, and as before we walked through the hottest hours of the day. The last mile or so was particularly difficult, because for it we walked uphill through sand. We seemed to be about five hundred yards from the dunes when thirst and fatigue forced us once again to huddle in the scanty shade of a creosote bush for an hour or more, while the day and our heads cooled. (One feels considerably less compelled to drink vast quantities of water in the desert when one's head is shaded.)

When we were ready to walk again, we cached our day-packs by our friendly creosote bush, and set out. Patrice balked at the last two-hundred yards, and I walked those alone, although she snapped a shot of me at the top of the first dune from where she awaited my return.

The dunes were remarkable -- those strange wind-sculpted, knife-edge forms, as though covered by a taut, reptilian skin -- but I was unable to spend more than a few minutes on them, before I had to head back to Patrice (and my water). Finding my way back to them was not easy, and required actually following my own tracks in reverse, since I could neither see nor hear Patrice from any real distance. Perhaps the last leg had been more than five hundred yards? In any case, the return was easier going, being downhill, but it was a long day and we arrived back at our vehicle just minutes before sundown, with a fierce nightwind already blowing.

We camped that night off the same dirt road as the night before, this time as precisely as possible to two miles from the paved road, having it in mind to make an early start the next day.

Mar. 4, Tuesday; Day 3
After a late and leisurely start, during the couse of which we recklessly squandered the glorious cool of the desert morning, we drove to the Mosaic Canyon Trail parking area, at the end of a dirt road from the Stovepipe Wells Village. Mosaic Canyon is one of the popular and non-secluded parts of the park; whereas on our previous two days we had encountered nary a soul on our hikes, in Mosaic we were essentially hiking in a crowd.

But as is ever the case in the American National Parks, the crowd thinned out considerably as we progressed through the canyon, and the hoi palloi never ventured into side canyons, of which there were an infinite supply. The bouldering in that canyon was amazing, and we spent hours covering very little ground due to strictly sticking to the walls rather than the floor. Before long we essentially had the canyon, or most of it, to ourselves.

One could have spent weeks exploring just this tiny portion of the park, since any side canyon led to whole new vistas, new rockscapes, new geologies. Many of them showed no signs of ending before we returned to the main trail.

Very few day-hikers reach what one might call the first end to Mosaic Canyon. We ate our lunch and spent a good forty-five minutes at the apparent end of the trail, and only one hiker happened to reach us in that time. But after our meal and rest we doubled back a few yards to where a small cairn of stones indicated that the trail bypassed the blind wall at which the canyon ended, and led to a new canyon as rewarding as anything that had gone before. We encountered no one at all in the "extension" we were walking in, until we reached what seemed to be its very end[but see here], at a dry waterfall (the blind end of the canyon being daubed with mud). (The trail could conceivably have continued, if one were willing to risk a feasible but not precisely easy-looking climb up the rock face.) At this second end to the canyon, we met a hiker from Port Angeles, Washington: David. We talked to him for some time there, and then he joined us as we exited the canyon. He practically lives in Olympic National Park, and actually lives in a cabin (no electricity, no mail service, no nothing) just a few miles away. An interesting and well-spoken man by any reckoning, and I certainly intend to look him up next time I have the opportunity to visit Olympic.

(Incidentally, David told us about Darwin Falls, an oasis-type area in Darwin Canyon, quite close to where we had spent the previous two nights. Apparently Darwin Falls boasts a stream, springs, lush greenery, good water, and actual waterfalls -- definitely a place we regret having missed on this trip, and a good reason for going back. He also told us about Saline Springs, within the park, a nudist hot springs area where if they were allowed, alternative lifestyle folk would live permanently in decadent if rural luxury, and about the Green Tortoise sleeper buses, a sort of Rainbow Gathering alternative to Greyhound. Both being institutions worth further investingation.)

After we left the Canyon, we still had about an hour of daylight, so we spent it hiking out to the big (but relatively much-visited) sand dunes at Stovepipe Wells. The sun was setting dramatically as we played on the dunes, under the no-doubt disapproving binoculars of the serenity-seeking retirees lined up along the road. I am afraid our duneplay lacked in dignity, and that the good people were cheated of the desert catharsis that might otherwise have been theirs.

We spent that night in a car-camping ground allegedly closed for the off-season. This meant camping in a gravel parking lot, and one crowded with other campers, besides. The other campers all arrived after we had eaten our dinner (they all had apparently been eating in the Stovepipe Wells restaurant) and were getting to bed, or we would never have elected to camp there. The only reason we did so at all was to be on that side of the park so as to get a very early start and not have to drive far to get to our day's destinations and thence to depart the park, for this was to be our last night in Death Valley.

Mar. 5, Tuesday; Day 4
Up with the dawn, for once, we were the first hikers to enter Golden Canyon, whose entrance lies close to Furnace Creek. The first mile or so we covered in near silence, largely because I was irritated at having received a speeding ticket that morning on an empty desert road.

This canyon and its associated tributaries are made of mud and shale and other crumbling, friable minerals, so it does not lend itself much to bouldering. However, like Mosaic, Golden basically offers a infinite number of side-paths for the exploring, each as worthwhile as the main trail itself. More so, really, since the main canyon still bears signs of an ill-advised and ill-fated effort to pave it, probably in the 'sixties when wheelchair accessibility rather than preservation was the guiding principle of the NPS.

The trail goes on much farther than is indicated on the maps. We traveled through the canyon until it ended, choked with huge boulders having fallen over the millennia from a great red cliffwall. As I stood under that cliffwall, in fact directly under a great column of stone whose base had been shorn away, leaving only the column itself stuck fast to the cliff, I saw footprints indicating that the trail led on still farther, along the cliffwall itself; sadly, time constraints forced us to retrace our steps.

On our way out of the park we did a wee driving tour, not missing Artists Palette, where manganese and other ores in various states of oxydation have colored the canyon walls with greens, purples, oranges and other outlandish splotches of color. We stopped off also at Badwater Basin, the lowest point on North America at 282 feet below sea level. The shallow pool of water trapped there is slightly more saline than sea water, but contains some life, especially insect life.

Finally, we returned to San Diego in time for dinner at fabled Kemo Sabe, where, with our excited reminiscences, we stoked to a raging heat Lukman's regrets at not joining us.

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