Day three we woke up early (we survived the hailstorm, yay!), made some coffee, and headed out to conquer Titus Canyon. It. Was. Beautiful.
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| Titus Canyon trail |
The trail was awesome, and not very difficult. I think you could do it all in 2WD if you have high clearance. The only times you might get into trouble is when it rains! The canyon totally floods when it rains and gets pretty muddy. Another cool thing - we saw two tarantulas on the trail.
Titus Canyon trail has a ghost town along it - Leadfield. The story of Leadfield is pretty sad - 300 people moved there in 1926 in the hopes of striking it rich. They were led there by wild tales of gold and fortunes. Unfortunately for them, it was a scam, and they went poor and hungry. By 1927 the town was gone
Just past Leadfield, the canyon gets narrower. At this point, you enter the Titus Canyon Narrows which is by far the coolest part of this drive. The walls reach up hundreds of feet and you can see where raging floods have carved away the rock over thousands (millions?) of years.
There is also a spot along the trail where you can see ancient Native American petroglyphs carved into the rock. Sadly, some modern a**holes have come along and defaced some of them with their own graffiti. But we found some that were in perfect condition too.
We emerged from Titus Canyon early in the afternoon and made our way to the main road. A couple miles down the road we encountered a couple of park rangers with a gate across the road that said "road closed." They asked us where the heck we came from because all roads in the area were closed due to flash floods and flood damage. They seemed shocked we came through Titus Canyon! They let us through, though.
We moved on to the Death Valley Badlands next, were the old Borax mines were. A short (and hot!) hike to Zabriskie point led us to some fantastic and unique rock formations. A nice older man offered to take our photo for us, which was really sweet! Now we have this wonderful photo of us all sweaty and dirty after three days of no showers. I love it!
After we left Zabriskie Point in the late afternoon, we headed out to find our last campsite. We didn't pick any of our campsites ahead of time, we just drove around until we found somewhere. You are allowed to camp off any trail in the park free of charge, which was really nice! The only things we had to pay for on this trip was gas money and food. Best kind of camping trip in my opinion. We stopped by Mequite Dunes while we were searching for a spot.
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| Mesquite Dunes |
We ended up taking a dirt trail out along the mountains near Panamint dunes to find a place to camp. It was so beautiful with dunes on one side of us and mountains on the other. Again, we saw no other people. It was very cool! We also saw these old abandoned cars along the trail. Makes you wonder what the heck happened to those guys.
Our final campsite was quite wonderful. We stayed up late reading and watching the stars, and finally had a clear night with no rain or storming.
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| Campsite #3 |
All in all, it was quite the magical trip. Death Valley is so huge and full of such varying terrain. The rock formations and even the plants are so unique, and sometimes strange. There was large chunks of volcanic rock all around our last campsite so when I got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, the light of the moon made it so surreal and made me feel like I was on a different planet! Way cool.
Bottom line: If you ever get the chance to go to Death Valley - GO!!! You won't regret it, and will probably make amazing memories that will last a lifetime. I know we did :)
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