Post Thanksgiving Death March - Trip Rep ort

“I feel the need to start this tale a day early. Thanksgiving. The wife and I drove two hours to her mother`s for dinner. Since I had to leave home at 3am to pick up Frank and Dustin, we drove separate – the plan being to leave after thanksgiving dinner, make the 2-hor drive back home, sleep for a few hours, then get on the road to Death Valley. That part worked out as planned, but what I hadn`t anticipated was how difficult it would be to leave a comfortable and warm house full of food, pie, and red wine – to say goodbye to a wife who wanted me around for thanksgiving. It was a mistake planning the trip so as to force this situation, but my brother`s job being as it is, this was the first chance he could go on a trip in 8 months, and the last chance until next spring at the earliest. My hands were tied. I said goodbye, feeling like a champion #&%!$, and then headed home. It was about 11:30 when I got home, 12:30 when I got in bed, setting the alarm for 2:45. The next thing I know, it`s 4:00am on the mark, and the alarm is blaring. I have no idea how this happened. I sent the apologizing “sorry, running late, leaving now” text to Dusty and Frank, then raced out the door, forgetting my headlamp in the process.

When I got to Dustin`s at 4:15am, there was a party going on. People were drunkenly coming out to greet me and, while we were loading his pack in my car, a group arrived from a Del Taco run with a burrito for Dustin. He hadn`t slept at all and smelled like whiskey. Frank was sitting on his lawn when I got there. Then, car loaded and Frank playing DJ, we were off to Death Valley.

There is no weather report for Panamint City. The nearest real settlement, Panamint Springs, also had no weather report. I settled for looking up the weather for Furnace Creek, Stovepipe Wells, and Trona – then averaging them and subtracting about 15 degrees because of the elevation we`d be at. Any way I looked at it, the weather was supposed to be pretty good – highs in the 60s, lows in the 30s, zero chance of rain and scattered clouds. It was cloudy and warm when we got to the trailhead (seeing there, to our chagrin, other cars – indicating that we wouldn`t have Panamint City to ourselves like last time). We loaded up and set off on the trail.

Even in cooler weather and shade, it`s a brutal hike. The first three miles are spent crashing through dense brush, filled with hanging vines that hook your pack, forcing you to clumsily struggle to free yourself from one vine only to, in the process, loop another vine or two around a protruding element of your pack, an arm, or a leg. Keeping your feet dry quickly becomes impossible, and you find yourself soon splashing down the middle of the river while toads scramble from your path. Cat-claw plants and broken branches scratch and stab you, always at the most vulnerable places, always when you least expect it.



Then, suddenly, the trail opens out into the former jeep-road – twin tire ruts running up the open canyon. You thank whatever god you have for the change of scenery, but this only lasts a few minutes as you come to realize that that steep and nonstop uphill grind on the loose gravel road just may kill you. You start to mentally beat yourself up. “Did I really need to carry up that entire bottle of whiskey?” (The answer, by the way, is yes). “Could I have packed dehydrated food instead of peanut butter?” “Why didn`t I get more exercise before this?” You stop frequently, feel despair when you consult your maps to find you have three more miles to go. You look behind you as the steep trail drops out of sight and gasp at just how far you`ve climbed in only the last hundred yards.

Then, finally, junipers start to line the trail and you know you`re almost to the top. Rounding a bend, you see the ruined brick smokestack from the original silver mill, built sometime in the 1870`s. “We`re there!” you think, but in actuality, you`ve reached a section of the hike called “hell`s half-mile.” With the city tantalizingly in sight, you grind up the last bit of the hike (more like .75 mile if you ask me… but that has less of a ring to it), the final exhausting hill, while the foundations and ruined walls of the mile-long, 5,000 resident Panamint City creep by on either side. Then, finally, you`re there.

Only, we weren`t the only ones. We were met immediately by a hiker who informed us (more than a little possessively) that he and his wife had already claimed the hillside cabin, and the main cabin was also claimed. Fine by us – we`d never planned on sleeping in the cabins. However, the wind had picked up with quite a bite, and the hand-me-down sleeping bad I`d loaned Dustin wouldn`t likely be much insulation against the 20 degree evening we looked to be facing. We had to find SOME shelter.
There is a U-shaped compound in Panamint City – the original stone walls indicate that the compound first came into existence with the 1870`s manifestation of the town. However, these walls have been “improved” by concrete slabs and wood paneling, clearly from the 1970`s manifestation. The compound formed about five rooms. Two of them had too much debris on the floor, two had holes in the roof, but one was perfect – intact roof, clear concrete floor, rusty wheel already in place and clearly already used as a fire pit in the middle of the room. True, the two windows were pane-less, and the gaping doorway (sans door) faced directly into the teeth of the wind. Yes, the insulation was probably asbestos and hung loosely. Absolutely, that is bat guano piled under the darker corners of the roof. But it beat sleeping out in that wind. We set the tents up in this room for extra nighttime insulation (every degree helps… and in the end, every degree was necessary), enjoyed the beers we (Dustin) packed in, then started in on the bottle of Beam Frank brought while cooking dinner.



As the night crept in, more and more backpackers arrived in town. I estimate that, by dark, there were about forty people in Panamint City. The air was filled with banging as people boarded up the windows of abandoned cabins or manufactured makeshift shelters from the ever-increasing wind. A couple set up in one of the roofless rooms across the compound (later that evening, we would hear them screwing, despite our best efforts not to) and several groups decided (amicably or forcefully) to share the two maintained cabins. We covered the doorway and one window with tarps, content to enter and exit our camp via the other window. With a small fire and 1/3 a bottle of bourbon in each of us, the room seemed pretty warm, despite the brutal cold air that poured through every crack in the wall. Finally, around 7:30, fatigue got the better of us and we slept.





The next morning, we were greeted by grey skies and icy wind. Could there be some actual weather on the way? Nah, the weather reports said…



So we set off on a hike to find the famed Coso pictographs that are hidden somewhere within the area. Those who`ve found the pictographs refuse to tell anyone where they are. I was acting on little more than a hunch. The last trip, I`d found a tiny pictograph panel near the main city. Later, looking at an old map in the main cabin, I`d seen a symbol (like a peace sign without the ring around it) pointing to, roughly, the same spot as that pictograph panel I`d found. These symbols were all over the map, and in one place, about 3 miles from town, in Water Canyon, there was a triple symbol. I marked the spot on my GPS and we set out on a wild goose chase for pictographs.

Because of the cold wind, we all dressed warmly. This turned out to be a very smart decision. About 2 miles from camp, while stopped at a ruined cabin at the mouth of Water Canyon for a… ahem… bathroom break, it started snowing. We got about 5 minutes of light flakes, before all hell broke loose in a full-fledged snowstorm that reduced visibility to about 25 feet. Frank wondered aloud whether we`d left the tarp on the door of our shelter open or not – whether as we sat there, our gear might not be getting soaked with blowing snow. We decided to abandon the hunt for pictographs, gather firewood (there were a ton of dead trees where we were, while in the main city, all the firewood had been picked clean), then lug it back to camp.



Being blind as a freaking bat, I wear glasses. The snow blowing into my face quickly rendered them useless, so I had to follow Dustin through the low-visibility storm, while lugging a bundle of firewood (to top it off, breaking up the wood, I bashed my left knee with a piece about the size of a baseball bat – my own dumb fault – so I was limping heavily). Eventually, though, we got back to camp. The tarp was not on the door, but the snow had not yet gotten into our shelter. We started a fire to dry out our clothes, and enjoyed the snow from our relatively warm shelter.

There`s something about snow; it has the power to transform a landscape – even a place you`ve been a hundred times – into something completely different. Something unfamiliar. I`d argue that there are very few landscapes in the world that aren`t improved by a blanket of snow. Add to that the way that snow seems to silence the world, dampening all sound and creating a deep sense of peace and well being. This sudden and completely unexpected storm transformed a good trip into a fantastic one. Of course, I wouldn`t be singing the same song if we didn`t have a good shelter over our heads…





After we dried out some, Dustin and I set off to explore the town. We peeked into a mine shaft that seemed to continue indefinitely in a perfectly straight line for as long as we could see, walked around the ruins of the old mill, as well as the ruins of a newer mill built in the 70s. From a hilltop, Dustin spotted a rather large ruin across the way that we`d made a note to explore later. I found a tripod laying half-buried in the snow, which I brought to the cabin to leave in a makeshift lost and found (the cabin`s inhabitants seemed annoyed at my interruption, possessive of their warm home and probably concerned that I`d ask to stay there too –or maybe they were just pissed at my tracking snow onto “their” floor – either way, they kinda seemed like jerks). Then it was back to our shelter to dry out again.









While eating lunch, I`d noticed that the storm had waned. Seeing it as possibly my last chance to find the pictographs, I suggested we go out again. Surprisingly, Frank and Dustin were all for it, so off we went, back into Water Canyon. We wandered high and low, climbed hills, threw rocks down mine shafts, explored ruins, but found us nary a pictograph. The spot connoted by the symbol on the old map contained more mining equipment, leading us all to believe that the symbols actually indicated a mine, not pictographs. Defeated, we headed back to camp once more to dry out.



We`d told Frank about the endless mine shaft, and he suggested returning with flashlights (his high-powered headlamp, and the fading mini maglite he loaned me) to explore further. I apprehensively agreed, not really wanting to go much further into the mine than Dustin and I had, but still curious enough to give it a shot. It turns out, we were all cowards. With the flashlights (and Frank wielding a machete – yes, he brings a machete on all hikes… I`m not gonna stop him), we still chickened out maybe 50 feet further in than last time. As far as we could see, the mine continued on.



We did some more exploring in the hills around town, during which I FINALLY AND ACCIDENTALLY FOUND THE PICTOGRAPH PANEL! I ain`t saying where, so don`t ask. Then, with the sun rapidly setting, it was back to the shelter for Dustin`s Johnny Walker, dinner, and another early bedtime.





I couldn`t sleep very well, so I got up repeatedly. The near full moon and the slowly falling snow made for a wonderfully surreal scene. Later, the clouds had cleared away and the moon had set, and the sky was alive with billions of visible stars. Kangaroo mouse tracks crossed the snow, and somewhere in the mountains a pack of coyotes bayed at one another. Finally, it was morning and Frank was stirring the ashes for coffee.

Then, it was the (much faster) hike out, and the long hungry drive. We stopped at Johnny`s Roadhouse Diner in California City for steak and beers. The service was beyond terrible and the food was only relatively palatable. You`d do good to steer clear.



That was about it.

It definitely was the last pack trip of a very eventful year, and well worth every second.”

“full album here: http://travel.webshots.com/album/575756567allCzU”

“great report!”

“Wow, two years gone already. As thanksgiving gets close, I keep finding myself thinking about this trip. Man, it was a great one. Maybe I'll head up there again in a couple weeks. Anybody might be interested?”

“Man that looks awesome...

'32oz”

“Thanks for pulling this one back up, I love pictographs/petroglyphs..great panel you found. The west is so cool. Snow in Death valley, this report has orally.. well written too. Nice work!”

“Should say "this report has it all"..damn phone. Orally? Lol.”

“I am going to need some popcorn to read that trip report, but it sounds like it would be worth it!”

“yeah, the "orally" part had me confused, 1camper :-)”