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"Wow! That's about the best place I've ever been. Our weather wasn't nearly as hot as your description indicates, which initially disappointed me but turned out to be to our advantage as it facilitated some very long and rewarding hikes. We basically sandwiched a 2-day 30+ mile loop through Marble and Cottonwood canyons with two shorter (maybe 8-10 mile) days -- one at Panamint dunes (we threw in Darwin falls that afternoon) and one at Mosaic (the gem of the park s'far as I'm concerned). I climbed about 80% of that second waterfall but the prospect of downclimbing the last section was a bit to much for my gravity-conscious heart. You might be interested to know, however, that there is a way up and around that waterfall (about 120 yards from the waterfall on the east side, cairns marking the first switchback and various other confusing spots along the way) which just keeps going up up up on the left (east) side of the canyon for (presumably) several more miles than we traveled (we didn't bring enough water, and we'd spent too long climbing around on the two waterfalls already), supposedly terminating in a magical little high mountain spring where bighorns reputedly frolic. Next time, perhaps. But the views of the valley from high up Mosaic were incomparable, so we ended up quite nature-nurtured anyway.
"Darwin Falls, by the way, is fine, and it's definitely important to climb up around the first falls to get to the much larger and more dramatic second falls; but besides being a waterfall in the middle of a desert, it wasn't so so spectacular.
"The Marble/Cottonwood loop was on the whole a good trip, though a book we saw in retrospect suggests that what we did in two days 'could be done in as little as three days', and three days would definitely have been more reasonable. Marble is the best part of that trip, especially if you find the petroglyphs (we didn't) and find the correct path out of the canyon into the huge, gently sloping, picturesque (but very very windy and cold at night, or that night at any rate) Cottonwood Valley (again, we didn't, which made for a very uncertain and tiring cross-country ordeal up and over a couple of hills and a very high pass)." |