Alive in Death Valley

Last Friday we left Las Vegas to go to Death Valley for the weekend. We joined Mike’s friend Bruce and three other folks for a canyoneering trip. We arrived around 9:00 Friday night, and found a spot to camp in the backcountry…aka primitive camping, which means find a spot out in the desert far enough from a main road and plonk down your tent! No water, no bathrooms, no picnic tables, just a lot of small scrubby creosote bushes and gravelly dirt. Good times! J Saturday morning we all got up at 6:00, before the sun and long before any warmth. It was 25 degrees overnight…..let me tell you, it’s not easy to drag me out of my warm sleeping bag into that! Still, it was beautiful to be out there in the middle of miles of desert and mountains; very isolated and peaceful. The six of us had some breakfast and loaded into Bruce’s truck by 7:00 to drive up into the mountains a bit more and find the trail head that would lead into the canyon we planned to descend. After 40 minutes of winding along a rough dirt road (thank you 4 wheel drive!) we found the spot and started hiking in. The sun was up and we were finally starting to feel warm; hiked about ½ hour or so before we reached the first rappel and the official beginning of the canyon. This was my first experience canyoneering, luckily it wasn’t a very hard canyon to get through. Some hiking along the gravelly bottom of the wash, some downclimbing of steeper sections carved out by the water, and rappelling of the steepest longest parts that would be too dangerous to climb down. This is a dry canyon, so we didn’t have to deal with any swimming or descending into pools! The weather was beautiful, and we all had a great time getting ourselves through the obstacles the rock gave us. It’s a pretty well traveled canyon, so there are fixed anchors to rappel from, which made it pretty easy for us. We’d just get to the top, set up a rope to rap on and descend one by one, then keep on hiking. We had two ropes to work with, so generally the first couple of people down would head off with one rope to get the next rappel set up while the rest of us got down. That way we could move faster and be sure to be out before dark. We probably rappelled 20 times total; some were as short as 10-15 feet, and one was 100 feet long down a smoothly carved channel of limestone. It was beautiful! At the end of the day we reached the last rappel before the canyon emptied out into the Badwater Basin. There was an incredible balanced boulder over the last waterfall, we all sat on it and basked in the sun for a few minutes, enjoying the warmth and the good feeling of having worked hard and finished a very successful day. I think we descended a total of over 4000 feet in the course of 8 hours! We ended near Badwater, 300 feet or so below sea level. After finishing the last rappel we piled into the other truck that Bruce’s friend had left at the base of the canyon and drove about an hour back to our campsite. Mike went with Bruce and Todd to pick up the other truck from where we’d left it in the morning, Lori, Rick and I stayed at camp and relaxed while we watched the sunset! (and made dinner). The guys got back an hour or so later, we all ate and chatted for a couple of hours and collapsed early into bed. Sunday we’d planned to try another canyon, but ended up just hiking for a few hours. It was hot! At least 80 degrees by mid-afternoon…quite a change from 25 when we woke up! Mike and I did one last little exploration of Golden Canyon (a touristy spot, but we found a side section to explore that was fun) then we left to drive north to Bishop, CA where we’ve been doing some more climbing. But that’s a story for another time!

Death Valley