4:20 am rolls around and I’m laying in bed wide awake. I’m keyed up, fired up, ready to go. But I’m also nervous. What if something else happens to stop me? It seems like all the currents are aimed at keeping me in my house.
I’m thinking about getting up, but that would have me on the road well before 5:00. In the last couple of days, the health authorities have slapped a curfew on us all. Only essential travel between 10 pm and 5 am. I don’t think heading off for a retreat in the desert counts as essential travel, so I hang in bed a little bit longer. Finally, I can’t stand it anymore, and I slip away to the shower.
Brother Blue’s wheels are rolling by 5:20. At that hour, the world is dark and empty. Normally busy streets are deserted. There are no sirens, no rush of tires on nearby El Camino Real, nothing. It’s just me and Brother Blue making our way to the freeway. I find it joyous to travel at this hour. Ordinarily there are so many people in my way. But in the deserted darkness, I’m able to wind my way through surface streets to main arteries to the freeway without stopping, not even once. Even the stop lights are with me today.
Over the next hour I roll south, accompanied only by random, sporadic travelers. By the time I get to Gilroy, false dawn is starting to brighten the sky above the mountains. My first stop is Casa de Fruta up on Highway 152. No road trip is complete without a quick stop there. Jalapeño and Garlic stuffed Olives are a favorite of mine. But there’s no traffic, not even on the normally bottlenecked 152 heading out of Gilroy. I’ll be at Casa de Fruta well before it opens. The treats will have to wait until next time.
What I’m really doing is using it as a place to pause in order to set up my Garmin inReach to track me. I’m expecting no cellular signal in Death Valley. There are people who like to know where I am, so I use the inReach to let them know where I am. It’s even possible to send short messages over the satellite, although the performance is slow. Still, what the inReach is doing is creating a map of my travels on a website on the open internet. I’m too paranoid to start tracking in my driveway, so all my travels start and end at Casa de Fruta.
Opening time at the Casa is only 15 minutes away when I ease back onto 152. I could have waited, but I’m feeling edgy and eager to get on with it. The sun is already peaking over the horizon. I have hours of driving ahead of me. 152 takes me over Pacheco Pass and then along San Luis Reservoir. In past eras I’d always blow pass the reservoir, snatching a few glances at it as I hurried by, before returning my attention back to 152 and its traffic and winding ways. But lately I’ve taken to stopping if traffic and my schedule allows it. The early sun is throwing a golden glow over the reservoir, so I slow, looking for an overlook. I find one that includes a short, rough dirt road only about a hundred yards long. There’s two cars parked at the end of it, but their occupants are all at the reservoir’s shoreline. I have the overlook to myself as I snap a few pictures with my cellphone of the dawn glow.
After that, it’s an easy, relaxing trip down 152 to Highway 5, then south to Bakersfield. Traffic is light, and generally wants to flow at 75 to 80 miles per hour. I play with my speed, paying attention to the fuel economy readings on the dash. At 65, I’m getting 18 mpg, which is respectable considering that I’m driving a motorized brick with a roof rack. At 75, fuel economy falls to 13 mpg. Amazing. I try to keep my speed right at 70, loafing along in the right hand lane as people in far more of a hurry than me race by in a blur.
I like driving, and I like wide open freeways, and I like the early hour with little to no traffic. There aren’t even many semis out to snarl traffic. I’m relaxed, sipping a RedBull, listening to satellite radio. Trace Adkins, Mind on Fishin’, comes on. His deep baritone is rhyming along with a honky-tonk beat that fills the Jeep, drowning out the outside wind noise.
“… There might be a few people talkin’ bad about me when they see that I’m a missin’…”
It makes me wonder what people are saying about this solo journey. Do they think I’m crazy? Or are they sick of my shit and just as happy to see me running off to the desert? No telling. I lean back, sip the bull, and sing along with Adkins — something that no mortal creature need ever hear.
I stop for gas in Buttonwillow — a conservative decision, I really don’t need it — then fight my way through Bakersfield on 58, which takes me over the Tehachapi Mountains towards California City. I roll towards that monument to greed and failed ambitions, thinking cynical thoughts about the California dream. If anyone ever wants to understand the American west coast mindset, they should start their search in California City. But that’s a subject for some other trip.
Just before California City, I catch Highway 14 northbound. This takes me through Redrock Canyon State Park. I’ve never spent any time here, and it intrigues me, but I already have a destination in mind. I linger long enough to stretch my legs, eat an apple and some cheese and crackers, then I push through to 395 north to Olancha, where I pick up 190 into Death Valley National Park. I stop in Olancha for gas and some last minute text messaging with the outside world. Again, I don’t really need gas, but I’m expecting gas prices inside the national park to be unfriendly.
The entire trip down, I’ve been debating what I would find in the park. It’s the weekend before Thanksgiving, and temperatures in the park have been running a mild mid-70’s during the day, which would suggest a lot of visitors. On the other hand, when I was running through Death Valley on motorcycle trips back in the early 90’s, the majority of the people we would met were from outside the US. That crowd isn’t traveling in these Covid times, so I just don’t know what I’ll find.
What I find is a sea of motorhomes and a flood of people. It appears that everyone has the same idea that I do, and they all have the same time off as me. I also think that Governor Newsom’s decree that families not come together for Thanksgiving means that everyone with an RV has decided to go to Death Valley for some holiday cheer. The place is jammed full. I had several established campgrounds in mind for my first night in the park. My theory had been that after more than 9 hours driving, I wasn’t going to want to do much more than set up my tent, make some kind of a dinner, and then crash. But those plans are immediately dashed. I knew I was in trouble when I was buying my entrance pass ($30 at electronic kiosks scattered around the park), and people were talking about how the local WiFi had crashed because everyone was on it.
I strike out at Texas Springs campground just outside of Furnace Creek, so I pull over to study maps and decide what I’m going to do. The sun is already getting low in the sky. I wonder if I’m sleeping in my drivers seat tonight.
Death Valley is massively large. At over 5,000 square miles (13,000 square kilometers), it has a relative scattering of established campgrounds and then endless miles of wilderness desert, as well as hundreds of miles of dirt road. The park service has an extraordinarily long list of places where you can’t camp in the park, but basically if you stay away from mining sites, water sources, and the valley floor itself, its fair game to pull over on most dirt roads in the park and camp, although the park service asks that you try to reuse sites that have already been disturbed. The problem is, where? I’m not familiar with this place at all. I had intended to hang out in an established campground, maybe talk to some people, study maps, and figure it all out tomorrow.
I have a paper map from National Geographic that shows the main dirt roads, and I have Gaia GPS which shows me the rest. I study these a bit. Just south of me is a paved road called Bad Water Road, and a ways down that is a dirt road called West Side Road. I doubt that I can camp on West Side because it cuts across the valley floor. But once I get across the valley, West Side intersects with a handful of smaller dirt roads that head up into some canyons. I figure I need to get far away from the heavily populated Furnace Creek and similar places in order to find an unoccupied wild camp. It looks like an hour or so to get someplace that might work for me.
I’m tired, but I’m still game.
West Side Road is wide, flat, nicely groomed, and has few pull outs. In one I see a rental RV with a cluster of people around it. I wonder if they’re going to stay there the night. I wonder what the fine is if they get caught doing it. As I pass by, I give one fellow a smile and a wave. This is common behavior in the park, people are friendly, but he gives me an imperious frown and a glare. “Why are you bothering me?” The reaction is so uncommon that I wonder if he isn’t a foreign-born tech worker down from Silicon Valley. He has the look, and the Silicon Valley attitude, which I’ve had 30 years to come to know. Except for one other person in the park a few days later, he’s the only one who isn’t smiling, who isn’t friendly.
Eventually I find my way up a rough, rocky, rutted two-track that Brother Blue eats up in 4-high. The sun is touching the mountain tops and I’m getting nervous. It’s going to be astronomically harder to find a spot once its dark. There’s a sign at the start of this road, down by West Side Road, that reads “No camping for two miles,” so I’m watching my odometer. Just pass the two mile mark I see a cut in the road’s rocky bank to a flat area with what looks like a fire pit. I feel like I’m still too close to West Side to take it, so I push up the road a bit further, climbing steadily as I go. Another mile or two in, and I see a site that looks about right, so I grab it.
I’ve come to a wild, rocky, empty place. I can see lights from some vehicles parked maybe another half mile or mile up the road, but I’m otherwise alone. The site is pristine. There’s no garbage, no litter. What looks like a fire windbreak doesn’t even have ashes in it (not surprising, since fires outside of established campgrounds are forbidden).
Exhausted, I go about setting up camp. This is when I run into my first hurdle. The ground is hard. No, scratch that. The ground is concrete. There’s a find layer of some kind of white powder on a flat spot scraped free of rocks that is exactly right for a tent. But beneath this is an impenetrable layer of hard packed rock. And I have a tent that requires stakes.
In planning the trip, I wondered if I’d run into something like this, so I’ve got what I call my “motivator box.” This has a 2 lb sledge in it, which I figured would be good enough to set the tent stakes under most conditions. But all I’m going to do here is break stakes. Fortunately, I watch a lot of YouTube. A guy in Australia had an idea that serves me well now: my motivator box also includes 8” lag screws, and a cordless drill. That works for me, with some effort, but I’m so tired I make an inefficient job of it. It doesn’t help that I’ve only ever set up this tent once before. This is something I need to get better at.
The sun is down behind the mountains before I finish putting up the tent. I have a Ready Light, so I set that up next, then my camp table, then my cooking setup. Its fully dark out by 5 pm, and with night comes plunging temperatures and a chilly breeze. Death Valley might be in the 70’s during the day this time of year, but it quickly trends towards winter with nightfall.
Dinner is spaghetti with italian sausage. Not rehydrated Mountain House, although fatigue tempts me. Instead I break out the cast iron skillet and the camping pot and I do it right. The Ready Light makes a bright, round circle of light around both my tailgate table and my camp table that I know can be seen for miles and miles and miles. If anyone is going to have a problem with me being there, I’m certainly not hiding from them.
Eventually I settle down in my camp chair with some hot chocolate. I’ve turned off the light, and the rocky landscape around me is lit up with ghostly white moonlight. I can see the stars, but between the half moon and a high layer of clouds, they’re dim. The moon is so bright that I think I could go for a hike without any sort of a headlamp at all. The wind has died down to nothing. It’s a world that is utterly at peace.
Absolute silence and solitude. It’s moments like this that draw me to wild places. I’m suddenly very glad that I couldn’t find an established campground.
By 7:30 I retreat into my tent and a deep sleep that is uninterrupted by anything other than a 3 am bladder. No people, no noise, no sirens, no cars, no animals, no insects, nothing. Its been a decade since I last slept as deeply as I do this night.
It is well worth the price of admission to be here. I could tell you exactly where that place is, maybe even give you GPS coordinates, but I’ve dropped enough directions already. If you want this, you should come figure it out for yourself.