This is a bit late, but here’s the report from last Sunday in Death Valley:<\/p>\n
Despite having been to Death Valley on many different occasions I’d never gone up to the northern part of the park, so I decided to pay a visit. One of the main attractions up there is the Ubehebe Crater, something I’d seen in black and white pictures but not in person. Had I seen color pictures I would have visited long ago — the crater is about a mile across, and the eastern wall is a myriad of bright oranges that bend and twist in a wave-like pattern. The opposite side is darker rock, but it’s layered in equally fascinating patterns.<\/p>\n
After walking around the crater for a while I hopped in the Subaru and headed off across a 4×4 road that my map showed emptied onto the opposite side of the park. Along the way I visted the Racecourse, a completely flat lakebed that stretches for a couple of miles, and then turned at teapot junction, which is a random signpost with perhaps a dozen teapots hanging from it — truly a bizarre sight to find in the midst of a remote desert. Along the next twenty miles of “road” were several abandoned mines and rugged desert scenery.<\/p>\n
The back roads of Death Valley are not for the faint of heart (nor for anyone without four wheel drive), and I had to crawl along fairly slowly to avoid damaging the Subaru or popping a tire. I was starting to run low on gas when I came to a barricade — the road was closed for wilderness protection, and any thought of bypassing the barricade disappeared when I saw that the road was washed out further along. Forty miles into a remote area of Death Valley with the tank hovering near empty was probably not the best of scenarios, and after turning around I was counting down how long it would take if I had to walk out. To conserve gas I traveled at thirty miles an hour over roads that I had earlier been taking at ten — a memorable experience, and I have an even greater respect now for the Subaru engineers. Luckily a fair amount of the way back was downhill, allowing me to coast without using gas, and about an hour and a half later I pulled into Stovepipe Wells with the empty light blazing. It’s a safe bet that the next time I explore remote 4×4 roads it will be done with a completely full tank \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is a bit late, but here’s the report from last Sunday in Death Valley: Despite having been to Death Valley on many different occasions I’d never gone up to the northern part of the park, so I decided to pay a visit. One of the main attractions up there is the Ubehebe Crater, something … Continue reading “Burbank, California”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[42],"class_list":["post-158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal","tag-death-valley"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=158"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11088,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158\/revisions\/11088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}