{"id":4915,"date":"2012-12-29T19:08:50","date_gmt":"2012-12-30T03:08:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/?p=4915"},"modified":"2015-09-30T13:39:51","modified_gmt":"2015-09-30T20:39:51","slug":"the-valley-of-death","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/2012\/12\/29\/the-valley-of-death\/","title":{"rendered":"The Valley of Death"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Some thoughts from today:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>There is all kinds of cool stuff happening in the desert town of Mojave.  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scaled.com\/\">Scaled Composites<\/a> (the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/SpaceShipOne\">first private company to put a man in space<\/a>) is there, along with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.virgingalactic.com\/\">Virgin Galactic<\/a> and all manner of other cutting edge aerospace companies.<\/li>\n<li>Off roading is apparently a much bigger deal than I realized.  While roaming dirt roads in the desert I passed hundreds of RVs organized into camps of 5-20 vehicles, each camp home to dozens of ATVs and dirt bikes.  One of the RVs in every camp was always flying a giant flag, and I&#8217;m gonna go out on a limb and say that these same folks show up in force for Nascar.<\/li>\n<li>The craggy, primordial landscapes in the deserts of the Eastern Sierra are the types that require the internal narrator to assume a deep voice and say things like &#8220;and thus did God create the EARTH&#8221;, with backing music from a booming timpani drum.  Driving through this area, it really does feel like this is how the Earth looked a couple billion years ago.<\/li>\n<li>Despite many past visits to Death Valley the Wildrose portion of the park is somewhere I&#8217;d never been before today.  That part of the park is at a higher elevation and featured a bit of snow, along with a landscape through tiny canyons and vistas that kept making me think how crazy it was that they even built a road here.  This area is now officially Ryan approved.<\/li>\n<li>I debated spending the night car camping in the campground at Furnace Creek, but instead of spending the evening wedged between RVs I decided to haul the Suby a few miles up a &#8220;road&#8221; (*cough* rocky gully *cough*) and am camped for the evening with a view that includes the entire Badwater Basin and has no neighbors.  Provided I don&#8217;t wake up in the morning with one or more flat tires this appears to be a far better sleeping option.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some thoughts from today: There is all kinds of cool stuff happening in the desert town of Mojave. Scaled Composites (the first private company to put a man in space) is there, along with Virgin Galactic and all manner of other cutting edge aerospace companies. Off roading is apparently a much bigger deal than I &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/2012\/12\/29\/the-valley-of-death\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The Valley of Death&#8221;<\/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":[42,31],"class_list":["post-4915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal","tag-death-valley","tag-man-trip"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4915","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=4915"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4915\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4929,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4915\/revisions\/4929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}