Monday, April 29.

S: We forgot to bring any of the several books we own about hiking Death Valley!  I was saying yesterday how it seems like we've done everything you can do with a low-clearance 2WD vehicle in Death Valley.  However I've picked up a book "Hiking Death Valley" by Michel Digonnet, which proves me wrong. This may well be our DV bible for the next several years.  Not particularly well-indexed or -organized, but the individual trail descriptions are great. We want to check out Hole-in-the-Wall and Echo Canyon from their descriptions in this book; we settle on Echo Canyon (which sounds like a lighty better road for the Saturn).

t: One could say we 'forgot', or one could say, 'we had two days, fuggit with getting guidebooks out!'....still, this new book is a great find, based on Echo Canyon alone.

S: We'll do Echo Canyon.  A three-mile drive to the "rough spot," and then a nearly-three-mile (each way) hike.  Nice.  The medium-narrow narrows has a definite echo, and a number of little arches or holes-in-rock, and some cool colors and shapes.  I guess the main attraction is the "Eye of the Needle," a teardrop-shaped hole about 15 feet up in a "stranded fin of rock."  There was and is gold in these here hills, but it's simply too expensive to get it anywhere.  The mines further up had some success for a few years, but ultimately shut down.  This story seems to have been repeated a lot all over the valley. We see only one other pair of hikers and two campers during two hours or so in the canyon.  It's supposed to be a bighorn sheep habitat, but they are evidently sheepish about making appearances.  Lots of quartz and also every imaginable color of rock (cf Artist's Palette).

Terrie drives admirably, with minimal scraping on the high crown of the road, and the Saturn manages it all without complaint - it's a good car.  We find the "rough spot" without much problem, and then we hike.  This is one of those places where you want 4WD.  You could continue on here, and drive on to 150-year-old mines and the Amargosa Valley, with a proper vehicle.  You can camp anywhere in the park as long as you're two miles or more from the paved road.  This would be REALLY COOL with a little 4wd.

t: Our drive in and out of Echo Canyon is nothing short of a Saturn commercial, had any of those sissies been arond to film it. I LOVE pulling into furnace creek with dusty Saturn and parking next to a pristine Ford Explorer. This little care and I re-bond here every year it seems.

Echo Canyon

Panorama - 25% - click for 50%

S: Again, naptime in the tent.  The campground is practically empty, and the wind has picked up again.  Chat-man's tent looks like one of those bouncy-houses you can rent for a kid's party, and we suspect it will lose its mooring and head on up the playa before the day is over.  I read more of Michel Digonnet's book, specifically about Monarch Canyon, which we may attempt later if we find the strength of two.  Allegedly there's not only a creek but a 60-ft waterfall!  It's not a long hike - maybe two and a half or three miles each way - but it would be daunting in the heat and/or wind.

Again, it's pretty warm in the tent, and sleep is elusive.  Terrie suggests we get out and drive to cooler weather, and it's a good idea.  We head for Rhyolite, which route will also take us past the place where we could hike to the lower part of Monarch Canyon if want to attempt it.  We don't, but we see where to park and we'll do it some other time.

On over to Rhyolite, the ghost town (which now has a web site, which has won a number of awards even with only 5198 visitors since March 2001), where we circle the famed Bottle House, pick up Rebecca's Self-Guided Tour pamphlet, drive through rather quickly, and then visit the weird sculpture garden at the entrance to the town - I take a photo of every sculpture - they are profoundly weird, especially situated as they are at the edge of a ghost town in the desert.  Ah, here it is: the Goldwell Open Air Museum.

Rhyolite

We stop in at Beatty, NV for something cold to drink.  There is an extremely tacky gift shop on one side of the street; on the other side, a "trading post" which actually isn't too terrible.  I buy two "indian blankets" for our tent - $7.95 each.  Terrie finds some nice earrings.  The lady who runs the shop is amusing in her transparent attempts to sell sell sell.

On the road, we notice a car stopped near the radiator water and a guy out in the middle of the road.  I figure he sees a snake or something.  As we near and pass, Terrie sees snake-handling equipment and I see that he's wearing gloves.  We really should've stopped; it might've been a good opportunity to see a rattler close up.  It also might've been an opportunity to interfere with a poacher.  But it's one of those split-second decisions as we're cruising along at 60mph and trying to assimilate the visual evidence... and by the time we might've decided to stop, we're already a quarter-mile down the road, and it has changed to a decision whether or not to turn around and go back, and whatever was going on may now be already over and done, and...  And so we continue on to Stovepipe Wells.

t: I only see something that looks like a flour sack, which is what a snake bag might look like. I find out a bit past that Steve noted gloves also. I weigh possibilities quickly, decide it's better to assume this was a rehabber working on a release than an evil poacher getting snakes destined for restaraunts. Miles later, I realize that IF it was a poacher we probably could have scrambled up the cash to buy all their snakes. All too late. Whatever it was, we passed it by.

S: We want to check the "other" gift shop on the south side of the highway.  Last year we purchased these coyote figurines by the mime Robert Shields, and gave most of them to people in my family.  This year we want to get them for ourselves.  We already have the one with the bear on wheels and the "Bear Rides" sign, and we got the antlered one and the "mother and child" one at the Furnace Creek Inn on Sunday.  None here we don't have except a bear on a motorcycle, which is *kind of* tempting but costs just a little more than I'm really willing to spend.  I'm also keeping it in mind at this point that I've taken some seven or eight rolls of pictures and will need money to develop them.

Back to the Ranch for dinner.  The New York steak is pretty mediocre.  The fudge brownie sundae is great, but I really didn't need to eat that much.

The walk between the campground and the ranch is always kind of interesting, crossing through the other campsites, the date palms, and the cabins; this time we detour out to the east of the campground - I'm interested in seeing the playa where the coyotes have been crossing, also interested in seeing what the attraction might be.  I think it's the golf course, or more specifically the water hazards, which we find hosting ducks and many other waterfowl - a little coyote smorgasbord.

At the Campsite

Golf.  I think of it as the main reason Mono Lake was nearly drained (and it's why you see the tufa, which should be underwater).  Such a waste, it seems to me, to pipe in water to create a golf course with lush grass and vegetation where desert should be.  The entire town of Palm Springs is like this, water used ostentatiously and wastefully in the middle of the desert for the comfort and entertainment of the wealthy...

It's still windy, but not quite as bad as Saturday, so we see more stars than on Saturday but less than on Sunday.