Wanderings and Musings

Advanced warning again… there are a lot of pictures on this post. As I took so many pictures, I wanted to separate this post on Death Valley out into it’s own post.

Don’t under-estimate the heat in Death Valley. It’s is amazingly hot in the summer. I wasn’t really prepared for how hot it was going to be. It was 115 degrees while I was driving around in the middle of the day and even drinking a liter of water every hour or two I was constantly thirsty.

It’s hot and it’s dry. It’s so dry your eyes sometimes have a hard time focusing and your mouth is always drying out… that is if you’re not in an air conditioned car like most of the sane people. Riding a motorcycle through that kind of heat is something only the insane do I guess

Surprisingly as long as I was moving over 30 mph I stayed fairly comfortable and the bike stayed cool, but when I had to slow down on dirt roads or sometimes when I stopped, then the bike would overheat and I would too.

There is a beauty to the barren rocks and nearly barren desert that you just don’t expect. It makes you think of the natural beauty that is everywhere underneath teaming life in other areas of the country. It also makes you think of another planet. Some places in Death Valley have no noticeable life as you drive along the road. No trees, no bushes, no birds, no insects. This is likely due to it being the middle of the day and all the smart creatures are hiding out waiting for the cooler night. While the dumber human, namely me, cruises along exposed to the heat and dryness wondering at the lack of life.

It’s a big park, and 50 to 70 miles separate some areas of the park that you may want to see, so give yourself time or plan for a long day.

My favorite part was traveling up Titus Canyon. Seeing the tiny path through the canyon, the Indian petroglyphs, the ghost town of Leadville and Rhyolite, finding a black widow spider, seeing the Gopher snake along the road, and even having to stop a few times to let my bike cool down from overheating… was all an exciting adventure. I stupidly only had a liter of water on my bike to drink and if anything had happened I would have been in danger of dehydration by the time I could hike out. I only passed one other car the whole 4 hours I was in that canyon road, so it was a dangerous thing to do, but even more exciting because of it.

I didn’t get back to Furnace Creek until almost 10 pm that evening, and it was still 95 degrees in the dark. I set up camp and tried to get some sleep but just couldn’t sleep with that heat. I ended up sleeping on top of the metal picnic table as it provided a few feet of clearance from the ground which was throwing off tremendous heat, and provided a greater amount of wind. I slept on on the table until 2 am or so when the bugs drove me into my tent… where I sweated and sweltered until morning. I woke at 6 am with the light (by the way, it was still around 85 degrees), and started to quickly pack as the sun was about to crest over the mountains. And this was a good thing. As soon as the sun started to shine, the temperature rose 5 degrees almost instantly and was 10 degrees hotter within 20 minutes. I was glad to be heading out of the blazing heat and into the mountains…

Check out the pictures I gathered up. It’s a beautiful place to see.

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