LIVING IN THE BED OF A PICKUP : Hiking in Death Valley

We spent 12 days in Death Valley on this leg of Roadtrip 4.2. We spent no nights in campgrounds. All of camping was "backcountry," which means off to the side of roads that for the most part ordinary vehicles can’t travel on unless they are 4-wheel drive. Trailers couldn’t make it even if towed by 4-wheel drive vehicle because the roads are too narrow.

Death Valley is similar to many National Parks in that it is designed to give visitors who come here for two or three days some interesting and beautiful things to see. In Death Valley that includes the Sand Dunes, Scotty’s Castle, Ubehebe Crater, and Zabriskie Point, among other places. You can get out of your car, walk a few feet, and take some photos, and be very happy.

The other side of National Parks is designed for people who want to get out and experience them first-hand—touch them, smell them, etc. These people are fewer in number—a fraction, in fact, of the folks who visit National Parks. I forget the exact figure, but it was something like the average person spends 8 minutes at the Grand Canyon. Walk to a lookout, take a few photos, and then walk back to the car. A much smaller number actually hike to the bottom or take trips on the river through the Canyon.

Vicky and I enjoy the beautiful sights that National Parks offer, but we also like to explore. We want to get to places where there are few, if any people, and see things that others may not have seen in dozens or even hundreds of years. We like to find old abandoned mining roads and try to follow them to find out why they were built. Sometimes we find an old mine, sometimes we find nothing more than a filled in hole that was someone’s small mine, and sometimes we find nothing—the road just runs out and we are left to wonder about who went to all of the trouble to build it and why. All of these mines were someone’s dream of good fortune. Very few of those dreams were realized. The work was hard, hot, and dangerous.

The other kind of hike we enjoy in the desert areas of Death Valley is exploring canyons, of which there must be thousands here. We will walk along the edge of a mountain range until we see an opening and then see how far up that canyon we can hike. Or we will see what looks to be an opening in the mountains across the desert, and decide to walk over to it and explore.

We never know what we will find, or how far up the canyon we can go. In general, the farther one goes, the more steep the canyons become, until we reach a point where we are no longer hiking but instead are scrambling. We will reach a "fall," (a rock that looks like a waterfall) and at that point turn back.

For this trip to Death Valley we went took some incredible hikes. Not once did we see another person hiking. We were all alone, in the desert.

Hikes to canyons:

This photo shows a canyon we have identified in the far distance. It is just over Vicky's shoulder.