With a mindful eye to the weather, I noticed that Southern California (including Death Valley) was going to experience a small window of below-normal temperatures. With highs at Furnace Creek likely reaching only the mid-90s during the day, I knew that it wouldn't be too hard to find slightly higher elevation and lower overnight temperatures for comfortable sleeping.
With a basic trip route planned, Alan in his 2016 Tacoma was in for the adventure as well. Both of us being dads with kids who are roughly the same age, most overland/camping trips these days include kids. For me, it is kids with mom at home getting much-needed time away. This time it would be just dads on the trip. Alan in his Tacoma, and me in my 2015 Ram 2500 AEV Prospector with a Four Wheel Camper Hawk. For me, this was the first off-road trip with this setup after having acquired the truck in October '23 and the camper in February '24, a few months later. I was excited to see how the setup would perform, and optimistic about what MPG the 6.4 Hemi would provide off-road.
The plan was to stop in Trona for one last top-off of the tanks, then head to Ballarat to start the off-road portion of the adventure. From there, we would head up Goler Wash over Mengal Pass, and connect back with Badwater Road before heading north to ultimately camp at the Eureka Sand Dunes.
The drive to Trona was uneventful. As expected, with my tires at 60 PSI, I averaged around 12 MPG. The same MPG I averaged a few months earlier on a round trip to Texas to experience the Total Solar Eclipse. Although there isn't much in Trona, it is a great fuel stop before heading into DVNP. The prices are well below what you'll find in Panamint Springs or Furnace Creek.
Shortly after filling up, we found ourselves in Ballarat and started on a self-guided walking tour of the main building and the surrounding artifacts.
Having been up Goler Wash several times before, I knew there wasn't too much trouble to get into. I also knew there were several cabins and mines to stop at that I've never had a chance to see. This was one of the first cabins we stopped at. The wash/road is about 10 feet behind this cabin, but the greenery is overgrown enough that you would never know the cabin was there, except for a small sign with the inscription "Newman Cabin". Inside is a guest book. Alan and I were the 6th (and probably last) group to sign for the month of May 2024.
After Newman Cabin we continued up the wash stopping to explore an abandon mining operation and the infamous Barker Ranch. I had been to Barker Ranch in 2018 and was shocked at how much of foundation of the main house had deteriorated. I suspect in another 10 years, there really won't be much left.
Shortly after Barker Ranch we tackled the infamous Mengal Pass. We were heading down the pass, so gravity did most of the work. Alan in his stock height (but fully armored) Tacoma needed a little guidance and wheel placement to keep those armor plates from seeing use. The pass was in pretty good condition compared to previous years I've traversed it. I did notice that the top of the pass now has two distinct lines to drop in from. One line on each side of the stone-pile monument.
One advantage of not having any kids on the trip, and not being part of a larger group, Alan and I could make a stop, check something out and then get quickly back in our trucks and move on. We took advantage of this to stop at all of the cabins in the Striped Butte Valley. In my past trips, I have only stopped at the Geologist's cabin. While that cabin is probably the most well kept, I find it to be the least interesting. The other cabins offer more of a flavor of what it would have been like to live in this harsh environment and what it would have been like to use every piece of building material available, even if the material wasn't designed for the purpose in which it was being used.
In the photo below, Stella's Cabin sits to my 8 o'clock. Stretching out before us to the east is Butte Valley Road with Striped Butte on the left, and one of the 20+ burros we encountered while traveling through the valley. It's incredible that there are so many natural springs in Death Valley National Park. For a place this hot and dry, there is an amazing amount of water, but only if you know where to look. Each of the cabin locations in the valley are near a natural spring.
After exploring the cabins we proceeded east toward Warm Springs camp where we stopped for the night. Sadly, a couple of the structures at Warm Springs Camp have fallen victim to flash floods, with several feet of dirt/debris washed through open doorways and filling several rooms. These flash floods also have seemed to change the flow of water from the warm spring itself such that there is no longer a 2' deep water crossing between the main house and Butte Valley Road.
After a very comfortable night's sleep with temps in the 60s, we packed up and headed toward Bad Water Basin. We knew we were going to be a few weeks past the basin being filled with water, but the uniqueness of the place lends itself to a stop. Plus, with no kids and just a small group, we were able to walk out farther on the playa than either of us had gone before. As expected, we did only find a few small pools of water and some wet/damp salted playa, but nothing like the photos we had seen in weeks prior. A small pool of water with a salt crust top. Similar to a thin sheet of ice that would appear on a small puddle after a mild-freeze. Easy to break through with a finger press.
We didn't have much of an agenda for the 2nd day. In fact, we didn't have much of an agenda for the 1st day. We knew when we were going to start, and the plan was to keep going until it seemed like a good time to stop. Having made great time from Warm Springs Camp through to Furnace Creek, we decided to continue north for a fuel stop in Beatty, but only after a stop at the Keane Wonder Mine.
In my experience, if something is on the National Park's Map, it's going to be a fairly mild physical experience, even if the NPS classifies the activity as "strenuous". However, the hike to the Keane Wonder Mine is as described! In the roughly 2 mile hike up to the mine, you'll ascend around 1,500 feet. While it isn't vertical, it is quite steep. You can read more about the mine in other posts, but the engineering that went into building the structures to support the mine boggles my mind. We had several chances to contemplate the engineering as we stopped to let our heart rates catch up as we ascended.
After a photo stop in Rhyolite and a fuel stop in Beatty we were in the mid-afternoon of the day and had to decide what was next. I was interested in making it to the Eureka Sand Dunes for the night, with a sunrise or if we made it in time a sunset hike to the top. The most common way to get to the dunes from Beatty would be through Titus Canyon then north. However due to hurricane Hillary (or some other recent storm) the route was closed. This means that we would be backtracking farther than either of us were interested in.
Prior to leaving for this trip, I had been scouring Google Maps, and Gaia maps to find some new place to visit/explore. During one of those map exploration exercises I came across what looked like a ghost town called Gold Point, located in Nevada just a few miles in from the CA/NV border. The route up to Gold Point would take us further north than we needed, but I knew we could connect with Death Valley road and ultimately make it to the dunes. Off to Gold Point from Beatty we went.
When we arrived at Gold Point, it appeared to be anything but a ghost town. From miles away, we could see activity, RVs, cars, people. As it turns out history runs deep in Gold Point. The 5-6 families that own the land host 2 or 3 town reunions/gatherings each year, and we just so happened to roll through on one of these events. A focal point of the town is is the bar/saloon. The building isn't much from the outside, but inside it is stuffed to the rafters with historical artifacts from the town and surrounding areas during their days of prosperity.
This photo is taken from about half way through the building, which is long and narrow. There is a stage for live music in the center of the long building on the right (you can see the speakers and floor monitor), but with the nice weather that weekend the live band was setup outside.
However, before the live music was to start, the families and town regulars took part in a themed parade. The theme of the parade this year was Disney. "Zorro" appeared to be the Grand Marshal and I grabbed a selfie shortly before leaving the town and heading for the dunes. I think had we known about the Gold Point event earlier we may have planned on staying nearer by. Everyone we talked to was very nice and friendly, but there was something a little off-putting about finding an abandoned ghost town anything but abandoned. At least for the weekend.
As we made our way west and south out of Gold Point, I only had a primitive route planned. Using Gaia, I had pre-routed a few options, but having never been to this area of the park or Nevada before, we had to take a few side tracks to find our way back into DVNP. Additionally, the heavy rains in the area washed out roads that appeared to be viable when using mapping software. At one point, just as we were entering back into Death Valley NP from Nevada, we found ourselves traveling in the tracks of another vehicle, only to have those tracks suddenly disappear. Some recon on foot indicated that we were traveling in a wash that paralleled the road. After back-tracking a quarter mile, we found where the road should have been, but was gone. To help assist the next group, we built a couple cairns and did our best to make our tracks up what had become an embankment onto the road obvious so that future travelers wouldn't follow our misguided tracks up the wash the way we had.
With sunset quickly approaching, we knew that Eureka Dunes was out of the question. So we started looking for alternatives. Thankfully we found a little turnoff into a dead end road where further travel was prohibited for wilderness restoration. The turnout was level and gave us just enough time to make dinners before the sunset. The next morning we quickly packed up camp (another advantage for small group and no kids), took in the views of the valley (if you squint really really really hard you can see furnace creek WAY WAY WAY off in the distance) and headed toward 395 via Death Valley Big Pine road. I marked this camp spot on Gaia, and hope to use it again some day!
I wanted to make one more stop before the 3+hr drive home. Along 395 a few miles north of Big Pine off to the east you'll see several of the largest radio telescopes you've probably ever seen. These telescopes are part of the Caltech Owens Valley Radio Observatory and/or the Owens Valley Radio Observatory and/or the VLBA (Very Long Baseline Array). Other than the VLBA it's difficult to know which scopes are part of which group.
I had visited the grounds with my kids the previous fall and although there is a sign at the gate indicating that trespassing is prohibited, just under that sign is a box where self guided tour maps should be available. The messaging is mixed and chances are if you don't behave badly you'll have a great time looking up at the radio telescopes and checking the scale map of our solar system along the south side of the main road. It's a great way to help visualize the size of the solar system.
To give you an idea of the size of these telescopes, the roofline of my FWC sits right around 8 feet tall. We are parked probably 20 yards from the base of the dish. What you don't see in the photo is that the dish was actively moving around while we were there. It was incredible to see the movements of such a large piece of equipment happen so smoothly and quietly. I think the dish moved a few times before we even realized due to how quiet the mechanisms are.
Fuel in Big Pine is a short drive from the radio telescopes. Throughout the trip I was closely monitoring fuel consumption, and I think this trip was a pretty good mix of the types of travel I end up doing on backcountry explorations. It had some slow/4Low driving, a lot of 2wd dirt road at 10-30 mph, and some highway driving at 55-60mph. In a 4Low configuration, the MPG of the Ram's Hemi engine is not great. So not-great that I don't want to think about it. In the other modes of backcountry travel I'm happy to report that I ALMOST break into the 10 MPG range on average. While this isn't great, with the ~30 gallon tank, that gives me a comfortable ~250 miles of range with maybe a little to spare. Not near the range of my Ram friends with their 6.7 Cummins and long range fuel tanks, but probably not too far off from Land Cruisers and 4Runners who are armored up and loaded for an overland trip. For the purposes of getting some dirt under the Ram & FWC setup, it was a perfect trip. Although I do want to figure out a good place to mount an additional 5-10 gallons reserve.
Both Alan and I have been to Death Valley on multiple occasions, but it felt like we had found a secret combination for a shoulder-season backcountry Death Valley trip. We had found a window where the weather was hot at lower elevations, but not too hot. Higher elevations provided warm daytime temps for exploration and nearly cool overnight temps for sleeping. If you had asked me before "how about a trip to Death Valley during the last weekend of May? NO, way too hot!". Outside of the Furnace Creek area, Alan and I crossed paths with NO ONE on any of the back country routes. There was so little traffic from the south coming up to Badwater Basin that we both independently felt like maybe the world had ended and due to our off-grid travel the previous day we hadn't received the memo.
With the growth in "overland" travel gaining in popularity, this weekend, with what felt like an empty park was one of my favorite trips. Death Valley in the late spring might be the best.
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