T: Wake up as it starts getting light, and make strong Peet's french-roast coffee in the press, and a tasty breakfast of chicken-mango sausages over the fire. Sit and write a couple of postcards as the sun finally breaks free of the mountains to the east...just about exactly 7 AM, and as our campground turns from shade to sun, the generator across the way roars back to life.

S: that guy never left the RV, that I can recall...

S: Okay, not to fill this thing with advertisements, but the chicken-mango sausages were really yummy. They're not yet on Aidell's list of products; I got 'em at the Farmer's Market in San Rafael. But they will be there, if I have any say in the matter. Darn near perfect campfire breakfast: quick easy, tasty.

T: The drive to Scotty's Castle takes us past the sand dunes near Stovepipe Wells, and then on into the higher, cooler areas surrounding the valley. We have good timing; only ten minutes before the next tour with spaces open, so we get our tickets and explore the grounds. The buildings are all thick adobe-type, with lots of tile and ironwork. Sometimes the rich do have good taste after all.

S: The tour is a LOT better than I thought it would be. For $8 each, we're treated to a guide in costume and in character, leading us through the rooms, and telling some really great stories about Scotty and the Johnsons. Also, some of the stuff in the castle is truly amazing. I particularly love some of the iron- and tile-work. The castle tour is definitely worthwhile, especially if it gets hot in the valley.

S: Brief stop at the "stovepipe well" east of the sand dunes. The road is closed beyond the first parking area, but we stop and think we're shooting video ("standby" was on): something about how all of the visitors from the coastal towns have taken off their shoes at Stovepipe, creating the acres of sand dunes we see here, and depleting the sand at the beaches, complete with a plea for common sense usage of available sand. The dunes at Mesquite Flat cover a pretty large area, and some of them are over 100 feet high. We mean to get out there in early morning or late evening one day, but never make it; there's always something left over for next time.

S: Janet Westbrook and others recommended Titus Canyon, and it's something we haven't seen yet in Death Valley, but we are unable to get concrete information on the road. On the Death Valley map, the words "Closed in Summer," in red, follow the road. The 8 am report says "High Clearance Recommended," but... how high? The park service lady at Scotty's Castle says we shouldn't have a problem if we drive carefully, and carry a good spare and plenty of water. This is good advice for travel anywhere in Death Valley.

The Titus Canyon drive is a 25-mile, one-way, dirt and gravel road cutting from highway 374, straight across the Amargosa Desert, and up over the Grapevine Mountains back into Death Valley. As we come over from Hell's Gate on the highway, the Amargosa Desert looks like a huge farm - a vast expanse of dark green. Only when we're actually in it does it look like desert.

We take the road. The first part is relatively smooth and straight, but with washboards and rocks here and there to avoid. The desert is "going to town"; all kinds of plants looking very lush and green, and whenever we stop to look more closely, we find that most of the plants have at least some sign of budding or full-on blooms. Some of the flowers are tiny, but they lend an overall tint of blue/yellow/red/purple to the ambient greenery. Beautiful. Up ahead, the Grapevines are a forbidding wall of rock, folded, cracked, jumbled, and also a riot of color.

Eventually, we climb up into the first passes, and the road becomes twisty and more rocky, in some places barely the width of the car. Each new switchback delivers a new vista of crazy chocolate/vanilla/strawberry/caramel rocks, an immense hot fudge sundae.

We power around tight curves with large loose rocks that could easily send a careless driver plunging off the side of two hundred-foot cliffs. In other places, the road twists between towering rock walls with barely enough room for the little Saturn. In still other parts, there is fairly deep sand. Doesn't pose much of a problem since most of it is downhill, but a large and heavy rear-wheel-drive vehicle could get bogged down in it.

As we come down around a particularly sharp curve, we're flagged down by a jovial and rotund woman; behind her we can see a line of about five stopped vehicles. Beyond that, a bus is jammed in the hairpin turn below, with the words "Southern Utah State College" emblazoned on its side.

The lady is eager to hang out with us, and explain that this busload of geology students from Utah has inadvisably taken the road, and their bus is now firmly lodged on the curve, thus prohibiting the passage of any other vehicle, and these people are idiots, and I am a witty humorist. Further, she asks if we have a shovel, since not one of these thirty-plus budding geologists owns any kind of implement for digging.

This "bus" is actually an Econoline-type van, with a bus-like box on its chassis, overhanging the rear wheels by at least ten feet. This box is lodged such that the rear wheels aren't making full contact with the ground. Further, the front of the bus is three or four feet from the edge of a cliff, over which, it must be said, more than one of the motorists waiting in sensible vehicles behind (not us, of course!) surely is contemplating simply pushing it. We pull out our handy camp chairs from the trunk, break out chips and guacamole, and settle in for a long wait. The kids push and pull at the bus, while the driver guns the engine. The rotund lady and friend hover over our chips. As one person notes, should the van break free at a certain time, it will reduce several aspiring geologists to puddles. My thought, as students push and pull, and the rear wheels spin vigorously, is of the upcoming headline, "Geology Students Killed by Rocks." One of the people who pulls up behind us has a shovel, and the kids commence to dig the bus out. A smaller van ahead, also bearing the seal of this esteemed institute of higher learning, backs up about a half-mile of road to assist in pulling the bus out.

The ineptitude of the officials charged with the care of these students, in taking them all into this narrow canyon, on this clunky vehicle, still just boggles my mind. In Death Valley, a stunt like this could cost you your life -- and the lives of several travelers behind you. How incredibly, amazingly, monumentally stupid, to risk this on a geology field trip without a pickaxe among them.

Twenty minutes of digging gets the bus out of this first of many hairpin turns, with at least fifteen miles of the same and worse yet to come. Thankfully, once they get it rolling, they pull it off at the first wide space, allowing us to pass and leave them to their much-deserved fate.

This canyon, though, when passable and not inhabited by moron professors of geology, is well worth the side-trip. Further on, there were a ghost town, petroglyphs, and more narrows.

T: This is really one of my favorite parts of the trip, not a little owing to the fact that the Saturn proves to be a really great vacation car. I've always been a little luke-warm when people asked me about it; standard reliable transportation is its main claim to fame. But it did so well here; the temperature climbed as we navigated the hills and curves, which was to be expected, but it also cooled readily when given the chance and never approached the red zone on the dial. The front wheel drive took us steadily up hills and negotiated the gravel better than I expected. The total miles for this trip came to 1785, with only a bit of a low tire to show for it (and that, too, was to be expected as we traveled many miles over gravel roads). After more than a year of driving it, the Saturn and I have finally bonded.

s: I feel the same way. The little Saturn, in the past, has seemed a slightly uncomfortable ride, which I've driven all of once - the day T brought it home. The Mustang would've been a lot more of a problem on this road, with its low-slung chassis and rear-wheel drive - may not have made it at all, but the little Saturn pulls through like a champ, and I have nothing but praise for it now. And Terrie does an expert job of driving, too.

t: But, back to the canyon... it is spectacular. I really love traveling through the narrows near the end; huge imposing walls of polished rock that finally opened onto a vista of the valley. Along the way, many interesting forms and plants (some fuzzy reddish cacti among them). Fall Canyon, just north of Titus, promises similar scenes, and is on my list for things to do on a return trip (that's a hiking trip, and warns of a gravel area for "experienced scramblers" to get to its narrows, so we'll have to learn a bit more about what's involved to really do it right).

S: By the time we get back to Furnace Creek, we're ready for food (and a shower? and another ecstatic swim?). We think, briefly, about notifying the rangers about the busload of kids up in Titus Canyon, but figure they have their small van ahead to get out and summon help. We fully expect to hear about it later. I assume they'll blowtorch the bus into small pieces and carry those out in a dump truck or something. Among our dining companions is the rotund and voluble woman who'd first waved us down. Her back is to us, and we avoid her.

Back at the campsite, we decide to head over to Badwater for sunset and dark, to avoid the blazing light of our neighbors to the left, and better see the configuration of crescent moon and three planets in close proximity.

Badwater is the lowest point in the western hemisphere. It is at the bottom of a white salt and borax pan that I would wildly guess is at least thirty miles long and ten miles wide. To me, it's like the bathtub drain of the earth. You can walk out on the borax and look back at a cliff side, on which, 282 feet up, is a sign that marks Sea Level. And some idjit is attempting to climb up to it.

We walk about a mile out, waiting for sunset and darkness. Note that since the sun sets behind Telescope Peak, the time between sunset and full darkness is considerable.

Walking on the borax is kind of surreal; it feels like if you stepped in the wrong place, you would plunge through the crust and fall to the center of the earth. It's somewhat comforting that the fall would not be as far as it might be elsewhere. The borax crunches underfoot with a sort of squishy, gristly sound. When you get out farther, there are plates of the crust with fissures between, some of the plates tilted, like miniature versions of the tectonic plates of the earth.

The last little bit of sunset hits the 5475' peak at Dante's View to the west. Very impressive. To the northeast, straight up the Valley, we can see the diminishing glow of the sunset on the horizon, reflected in the small pool of "Bad Water."

The promised three planets start to appear, all within a few degrees of a fingernail crescent moon. Jupiter, Saturn, and, um, the other one (Mars?). We can clearly make out the full body of the moon, illuminated by the sliver of the crescent, with naked eye, much better with video zoom.

T: It's really a lovely warm night; though the temperature is still "hot," it is indeed a dry heat and some gentle breezes come up as the stars come out. It is blissfully quiet and peaceful.

S: Those "gentle breezes," more often than not, are hotter than the ambient temperature -- heat blown up from the ground -- but still feel good simply because it's moving air.

S: Presuming that we've given our neighbors enough time to prepare and eat dinner by their overbright lantern, we head back to our campground.

We find that we have new neighbors to the right. Thirty aspiring geologists from Utah, crammed into three or four campsites. They've set up their kitchen, and four or five tents, directly next to our site, including one tent less than ten feet from ours. Also, the neighbors to the left are just starting on dinner, with attendant light, and their child is just starting on a new tantrum. Ah, roughin' it!

T: Even more annoying than the noise, later on, was the light that kept crossing in front of my (initially) closed eyes while trying to go to sleep. Someone's headlamp, no doubt. Dunno, we take all kinds of flashlight batteries and in over three years of camping have only replaced batteries once (before backpacking, just to be sure). I like the dark. Anyhow. My prayers that night include, "please let me see a sidewinder, and it would be nice to see it cruising over into the campsite next door."

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