After breakfast, we headed back through Lone Pine and east across the rest of the state to Death Valley. We made our usual stop at the Brother Crowley view point above Panamint Valley and then pushed on to Stove Pipe Wells. We made sandwiches for lunch in the parking lot there, and again as usual I fell victim to the pricing trap at the little market there. Twenty dollars later I had my first taste of Rogue Brewing’s chestnut brown ale - it was in fact the most amazing beer I’ve ever had while it was 103 degrees out.
While we ate our friend Balm called to schedule his visit to the Sprintilus. We set some dates we could have him fly into and out of cities on our trip and hoped he could make it work. We’d planned from the beginning to have guests along whenever possible and he was the first to have the desire and availability to ride along. We were looking forward to having company!
All day we had been discussing whether we would make the relatively quick trip out to Marble Canyon for our first night in Death Valley, or if we wanted to shoot for the Racetrack directly. The relatively cooler weather at the Racetrack’s elevation convinced us to drive on. So, after finishing lunch at about 2pm, we headed to the top of Death Valley and got onto the long, washboard road out to the Racetrack. This was the final ‘major’ attraction in Death Valley that Celine and I had not seen and we were both excited.
About three hours of washboard driving later we had made it to Teakettle Junction, a spot about three quarters of the way to our destination. The van still had its factory tires installed and they were definitely not well suited to the task at hand. Mercedes ships new Sprinters, even 4x4 models, with Continental Vanco four season tires. They were pretty decent on the highway, but they had stiff and unprotected sidewalls and their performance on the washboard track so far had been abysmal. We were learning, however, lots of tricks for packing our kitchen storage area with every conceivable item we had to keep things from rattling.
It took us about 4 hours of painfully slow and bouncy driving to make it to the playa that makes up the Racetrack. The shadow of Mt Ubehebe was just beginning to cross the valley floor as we made our first exploration of the site. We rushed the process a bit to make it to the dry camp at the end of the valley before dark. As we pulled into the camp we realized we were quite perfectly alone, and that all the cars we had seen in the last 5 hours had been going the other direction. This felt like a good reason to extend our stay at the camp for another night or two! Also, I couldn’t imagine another 4 hours of bouncing quite so soon after the first round of it.
We spent most of our first night with our sleeping bag, mat, and pillow on the desert floor looking at the stars. We had cooked dinner and eaten outside with the red spreader lights on and the bats had given us quite an aerial show as they ate the bugs that the lights drew. After a couple hours of picking out satellites, making up constellation names, and assuring ourselves that we could tell the difference between a planet and a star we fell asleep outside. Celine woke up in the early hours of the morning and remembered she was scared to sleep outside, so we moved into the van and finished the night in all the safety that entailed.
We spent the next day hiking around to whatever spot we found that intrigued us. As it grew hotter we had our first trial run on our solar shower, and as we were still alone, we used the sun and the breeze as a natural towel substitute. In the hottest hours of the afternoon, and clothed again, we lazed in our chairs in the shade of the van and practiced our desert ritual of Willie and Margaritas. I realized on this occasion - only my second time hearing a full album’s worth of Mr Nelson’s music - that Willie fancies himself a little bit of a bad boy. While considering this, I gave a quick effort to sing ‘tequila river, don’t run dry’ and proved why whiskey is the beverage of choice for cowboys.
We closed our second evening alone at the Racetrack with a torrent of bugs that showed up in the dark and filled the interior of the van before we realized what was going on. They didn’t bite, but liked to dive bomb your eyes, nose, and ears and made any attempt at sleeping quite uncomfortable. Our little hand-held 12v vacuum found its true calling in life and we were able to get another peaceful night’s rest after sucking hundreds of their poor little souls through its tip and into its belly. My conscience had remarkably little effect on my quality of sleep.
