Yesterday morning Deb and I were a little late in getting up and out of the hotel in Carmel, but we figured that we had plenty of time, since the hikes we had planned on doing in Big Sur were most likely closed because of the fires and flooding in the area. We headed out on the PCH, a crazy curvy, narrow road on the cliffs of the Pacific coast. We drove for hours, stopping at vista points for some photo ops.....
It was a long day of driving, but we did manage to stop at Salmon Creek for a short hike to some waterfalls, and a lunch up the hill in a nice meadow. The hike involved some serious scrambling to find a way over the massive boulders, but it was fun! I felt like a kid again!
Once off of the PCH the drive was mostly monotonous, but we did pass through some hills just southeast of Big Sur that were so incredibly green.... I felt like I was in Ireland again! With all of my things packed into the back, my car struggled to make it up every little hill we came across, and the trip took longer than we had planned. We didn't get to Olancha, our overnight stop, until 9:30. We had planned to stay at a place called the "Rustic Motel", located right on 395 - a major highway - and when we got the the "town" we almost missed it! There was a motel (which turned out to be ours) with no real name noticable on the sign, an RV park, and a ranch.
The motel was not quite up to Deb's standards (or mine for that matter), but it was a funny experience. Deb was afraid to take her shoes off. We slept in our sleeping bags on the bed.
This morning we headed out for Death Valley and reached the rim by mid-morning. It's crazy, because we were at over 4,000 feet when we reached the rim, and we knew Death Valley had places that were under sea level (-300 ft), so the drive down was hairy in spots, and exciting! Unfortunately, when you enter the park from the West, you go down into a canyon, and then have to climb the other side, just to go down again. My car wouldn't get out of 3rd gear without complaining, so we climbed the eastern rim of the first canyon at 15 miles an hour...
We got to Stovepipe Wells, the central station in Death Valley by late morning, grabbed a campsite, and then headed out for a hike in the Mosaic Canyon. Very beautiful, in an extreme kind of way. It was a fun little hike, scrambling up the marble canyon walls. I took a higher road at a fork in the path at one point, and found myself at the top of a cliff, where I had to navigate the jagged rock walls to get down. It was exciting, but unfortunately there was a group of senior citizens that seemed to think I couldn't make it, and they were staying to witness my 'inevitable' fall. I made it unscratched, of course.
The hike was nice, but with the midday sun beating down on us I was just too hot to enjoy it fully. We went back to stovepipe after the hike and improvised a lunch (Deb is getting sick of my anti-restaurant regime). There is a hotel-ish kind of thing going on here, among other such development (yuck), but they have a pool that we bought tickets to use, and it was SO refreshing! We are heading off to the sand dunes down the road now for an afternoon hike up the dunes, before turning in tonight. Tomorrow its off to the south of the park, including Badwater, the lowest point in the US (-300 ft).
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