11-20-06 Death Valley

Bob owns a series of self storage units. In one of these someone left a nice bench. Bob used it for a while and then gave it to Tom. Tom, and with a little help from me, put some wheels on it and got it cleaned up and ready to go inside. Notice the nice new sticker on it….

I finally got a picture of the drag car next door. He was loading it in his trailer and headed to the drags that night. He said it was done by a body and fender guy and has somewhere around thirty coats of the most amazing paint I have ever seen. it has many different colors of tiny flecks in it and the paint seems like it must be an inch deep. It is truly amazing out in the sun. By the way, that is not a squashed photo, it is a chopped top….

Mocha dog from across the street checking out the interesting places in the Pod. She didn’t find anything very large and nothing on the run, but she was hopeful.

The weather has been just so nice I just  had to go for a ride. I headed on into California headed to Death Valley. There is a nice stretch of road called the Joshua Highway. It is wonderful to get out and ride the open road again after being in camp here in town.

I stopped by Tecopah thinking I would take a nice hot bath in the hot springs. Well, times have changed!!! It now costs $$$ to go take a bath. I thought I remembered that Chief Tecopah had given the waters to the people to use forever for free, but somehow white man with the forked tongue has been able to figure out a way to reinterpret that. There are a bunch of old crippled people that come there to take the ‘healing waters’.  I guess they now  have to come with money as well as being crippled. This guy entering here was making very slow progress. Jeez, it seems like all the nice old hot springs are getting really screwed up now. Progress…………

I stopped in Shoshone for fuel and find that they are just as over priced as usual. It is nice to have only the bike to fuel and not some big motorhome.

When I came into the valley I took the West Side road across the valley from Bad Water. It is gravel and in pretty good shape for the most part. The road crosses the salt flats and I stopped here where the salt forms some serious convoluted crust much like what I saw down in the Atacama Desert in Peru.

Another part of the salt flats.

I rolled on into Furnace Creek and spotted this BMW HP2. This is the new high velocity dual sport bike that they just come out with this year. This bike has a bunch of very new Touratech equipment installed. In the background there is a guy on the porch writing on a laptop computer. I walked over and talked briefly with him. The bike has a foreign plate and I think the guy was German. He said that he was road testing the proto type new equipment that Touratech was making for the bike. He said that it would be available next year. I thought it was sort of ugly with the add ons but I know that they bike needed more fuel than the three gallons that it comes with. The big add on fuel cell he said made for a total of nine gallons. The little aluminum panniers were attached very weakly I thought. If this bike goes down, I think the bags will just rip off. They were mounted very wide as well and seemed they were higher than necessary.

I wasn’t impressed with the products, I did like the things that Tommy (who went on the Nez Perce and Stomp this summer) did to his HP2.

I went back out on the west side road and spent the night on the edge of the salt flats. I wasn’t going to set up my tent but just sleep on a ground sheet but after the sun went down and it started getting dark, the first mosquito came out!! Time to set up the tent! There was no need for the rain fly as the weather was for mid 80’s and sunny for the weekend. I rode the next day up to Scotty’s Castle and then on back down to Stove Pipe Wells and then over out of the park on the west side to Keeler. There is a friend of a friend that lives there but he was not home so I headed on back over the pass and down into Panamint Valley were I spent the night. It was nice to have a quiet valley to myself and the stars were out in force.

In  the morning I rode on up to the Charcoal Kilns.

The kilns were packed with pinion pine wood and set on fire and then smothered to make the charcoal. There were small holes around the perimeter about four feet off the floor and one big vent/exhaust hole in the back.

This is starting to get to be high country and the view down to the valley was spectacular. You probably cant see it from this photo but I could see four mountain ranges from here.

The road goes on up from here and there is a campground at 8,133 ft. There is a trial that goes on up to 11,049 ft but it is for hikers only and not GS bikes. Darn!!

This is a pipe along the way up to the Charcoal Kilns.

I came on back to Stove Pipe Wells and had to grab a required photo of the steam tractor that they tried to replace the 20 mule teams with. They had a lot of problems with it but it did do some work.

I  liked the iron work on that tractor. It has spokes just like the Boodhound!! Well, a little heavier.

Yup, it was nice down low. I camped maybe three hundred feet below sea level.

I took a little side road called the Twenty Mule Team Canyon that was really nice.

The road was mostly flat and easy but there was one stretch that must have been hell with a team of mules as it was just plain twisty and steep.

I charged on out of the park down Greenwater Valley. The road was gravel and fast. The thing I really liked about this trip to the Valley was that there was very little traffic. On the back roads I was the only one and even on the paved roads the traffic was fairly light. I didn’t run through the chutes like the tourists so that made it much better.

On the way home I stopped in Shoshone at the Café Cest Si Bon which is a really cool little café. They have mostly vegetarian gourmet food and it is really good food. I ate there a couple of years ago when I was camped up the wash for a few days with my dog Ely. We would come down and eat and he also has a computer for internet. I didn’t do internet this time as I was going to be back in camp that night. If you ever do get to Shoshone do stop by and have a great bite to eat.

It was mostly uneventful on the way back through Las Vegas but I am always so amazed at how people can live in those housing tracts of all the same kind of houses. The city is expanding like crazy and what used to be desert a few years ago is now miles and miles of houses and new businesses.

The freeway though town actually wasn’t too bad on this Sunday afternoon. The speed limit on some of the roads is 55 and traffic was hauling along at least 75, and some going faster than that.