see also: 2006 trip

This year was Laura's 10th consecutive trip to Death Valley, almost; there was technically one year that was missed, but we gloss over that. It was more like the sixth or seventh time for me, I'm not sure. Bi Ji and Chrisi went with us this time, which made this another historic milestone: Bi Ji went with us in 2002, which makes her the first repeat customer.

We left as early as we could on Saturday, which turned out to be just after 11. By the afternoon we had run into the first complication, which was that you can't drive across Yosemite until May, something that neither me nor google maps knew. (See for yourself!) This sucks, because by the time we got to the Tioga [Im]pass, we were barely 100 miles from the north end of Death Valley, but there was nothing to be done but turn around and drive all the way back out to Merced, south to Bakersfield on the 99, through Ridgecrest, and in through the south end of the park, the same way we would have come from Los Angeles. So this took a while. Bi Ji got a speeding ticket, as pictured, Chrisi got his first visit to Del Taco, and we all got to ride in the car until about 2am.

We stayed at the Mesquite Spring campground which is near Scotty's Castle the first night, the idea being that we would be an hour closer to Racetrack in the morning, which is where we went. Chrisi got his Costco tiger-shark kite named Bruce to fly here, which I'm sure you can't see in the tiny version of this picture. Great success! We didn't try to get to the Eureka sand dunes, but rather tried to find a place called Dry Bone Canyon. As tends to happen on the canyon hikes, we found a canyon and walked up it for a while, likely not the one described by the book writer. Which doesn't really matter a whole lot, since the fact of the matter is that the canyons all look pretty much the same.

This was also the location of the first flat tire. This is a pretty common problem, so we had a full size spare that we got on without too much trouble. Laura took the pictures of this operation, so I can't show you until she has put them up. I wasn't happy about having 30 miles to drive on the rocks to get back to a paved road, having lost our N+1 redundancy, but we got out and back to Furnace Creek where we stayed the next two nights.

In the morning, Bi Ji and Laura took the car to the garage and found that the flat tire could be patched, another great success. So we went south that day, to Badwater and then to Shoshone and then to a new place we haven't been called Ibex Spring. As usual, the "spring" isn't a place with any liquid water; you only know it's there because plants like these palm trees grow. There is a ghost town, a mine, and sand dunes here, so if you're coming in from the south, you can see pretty much everything you are going to see in Death Valley in one stop. We went through Artists Palette on the way back, and got home to the campsite after dark.

Last day, we went to the Stovepipe Wells sand dunes and Skidoo, another mine-ruins site that we had never driven out to, even though it's right next to Aguereberry Point where we go every year. Except this year, it turns out, because we were only about a mile down the Aguereberry Point road before the car problems got more interesting.

This road has gotten very bad, much worse than the road to Racetrack, even though it was easy enough to do in my own car as recently as 2002. The CD player was crapping out, so we turned it off, and discovered that the car was making a very unhealthy noise. The best description I can give is that it was like a rock in a metal blender. We tried a few experiments, and found that the noise was indifferent to the engine speed, but changed with the speed of the wheels. We went backwards and forwards a few times, hoping that it really was a rock caught in something that we could shake loose. We tried crawling under the car to look, but it being crazy hot under there plus us having no idea what we were looking for, we gave that up.

So I called off the attempt to get to Aguereberry Point, since the only time I have heard a noise like that was when the transmission in my truck died forever in 2001, very near the same place, coincidentally (or not). I was expecting the car to crap out completely any minute, so I didn't want to use our last couple miles of motorized transport to get farther from the highway where somebody might eventually find us. Once back on the paved road, we had to decide whether to try to go back to Furnace Creek (~30 miles) or on out of the park to Trona (~50 miles). We decided to try for Trona since it was the direction we needed to be going, plus it is downhill most of the way, so I figured as long as the wheels could turn, we could probably coast 20 miles or more.

That's more or less what we did, coast 20 miles towards Trona, since I didn't like to apply any power while it was making the death-rattle, when the flat tire warning light went off again. We stopped on the side of the road to verify that there really was a flat tire. Then everybody got out and I turned the car around to go back to the wider spot in the picture-and the horrible noise was gone. I was amazed, since I'm not generally the kind of person whose expensive problems magically go away on their own, but after we changed the tire (riding on Mr. Patchy now of course), the noise never came back.

So we got on all the way through Trona to Ridgecrest, where we took the car to Rusty, the mechanic that I remembered from when the truck died. He was busy and didn't want to look at the car, and insisted that the bad noise must have been the tire. Now I've had one or two tires explode before, and I'm pretty sure that's not what it was. But I didn't see what else I could do about it except continue to argue with somebody who obviously knows more than I do, so we decided we had done our due diligence with the car and went to see about getting the tire fixed. They said it was unfixable, so we ditched it here and drove the 400 miles home without it.

Later I had to buy a tire to replace the one that we left behind, which cost about $250 and left me disinclined to buy a second one to replace the patched tire, which we found to be leaking, since it was going flat again by the next day. I didn't volunteer that information when we returned it, nor did I tell them about its new habit of vibrating hard and lurching to the left when braking, but hey, they asked no questions so I told them no lies. I'm a little afraid to look at the credit card bill, but nobody called me about it.

I didn't get a whole lot of pictures I was excited about, but here is one that at least has everybody in it:

And the rest:

10 Mar: A short trip to Yosemite
11 Mar: Ubehebe Crater, Racetrack, random canyon in the vicinity of Dry Bone
12 Mar: Badwater, Shoshone, Ibex Spring
13 Mar: Stovepipe Wells, Skidoo

30 Mar 2007 00:58 PT - persistent link - trackback - 1 comment