For Christmas 2015 my wife and I were still living in the RV. We decided to park the truck and trailer at Nellis AFB in Las Vegas and fly east of the holiday. After Christmas break my wife and I and planned to go visit Death Valley for a few days. The park is only a few hours drive from Vegas, and since we had to check out at 11am from Nellis and couldn’t check in at Death Valley until 4pm, we had to kill some time. We decided just to pull over on the side of the road, walk Charlie around and play cribbage for an hour or so. It worked out pretty well and we arrived at the Stovepipe Wells campground right on time.
After a quick set up (we really have it down after 8 months) we took some time to pick out a few off-roading routes for the following day. We ended up deciding on the Titus Canyon route which promised a wide variety of terrain and the possibility of spotting some bighorn sheep. We slept in the following morning and then hit the road.
We had a decent recovery gear set up that I mentioned previously. Actually I had a full size floor jack and tool kit as well since I had them for the RV travels in general. I, of course, had my list of truck mods and I was eyeballing some suspension upgrades. But first I wanted to test out the stock truck before I considered any modifications.
The trail started off with a lot of gravel. I decided to air down the tires because there were some larger, sharp rocks. While I was working on that my wife was wandering around checking out some plants and had a run in with an angry raven. They get that way sometimes.
Eventually the gravel eased up and the road became mostly dirt with some larger rocks mixed in as well. We kept our eyes peeled for bighorn sheep but we weren’t lucky enough to spot any on this trip. We did, however, come across an abandoned mine and ‘ghost town’ which was pretty cool. Well, the mine was cool. The ghost town was a bit underwhelming. A few foundations and a few shacks that are supposedly full of rat poop.
We continued winding up into the mountains and it was getting a little scary for my wife. She is new to this kind of thing and felt that it seemed like we were very close to the edge and the road wasn’t very wide.
Once we passed the petroglyphs we squeezed through the ‘narrows’ of the canyons before popping out at the end of the trail. We connected back to the main road and went back to the campground.
Death Valley is pretty incredible and I have been a few times. There was quite a bit more vegetation then my wife expected for a desert even if it is mostly Joshua trees and cactus (cacti?). There are also some pretty serious mountains, canyons and sand dunes. Despite all the beautiful landscapes I think our favorite part of the park is the night sky. There is zero light pollution so as long as you have a clear sky you can see forever. The Milky Way was clearly visible and you could see so many stars. It’s hard to believe all those stars are always there, we just can’t see them because there is too much light near cities.
We took out the telescope one night to take advantage of the stunning darkness and sky. We are amateurs, at best, with astronomy so we never really noticed that Orion had a ‘red giant’ star in his shoulder but the red was so vibrant you wouldn’t miss it out here. We later learned this star is named Betelgeuse. Aside from Orion and the Milky Way we also did our best to locate several other constellations using our planisphere and took a close look at a few specific stars. Looking at the stars through the telescope was really neat because they looked like a glittering, blinking ring. Sort of like a disco ball with a dark center. Our biggest issue viewing things is that we had a crappy tripod so it was tough to lock in on things and track. We have since upgraded to a dedicated equatorial telescope tripod that is much better. It is also much heavier.
