Proof of Life

It’s 2:30 before I swing into Mesquite Spring just to see it. There are water hoses here, both potable and non-potable. There’s also flush toilets and garbage bins. And one RV after another. Dogs. Generators. To my surprise there are campsites open. I dither a bit, and then decide to grab one. This is essentially what I was looking for yesterday. It probably won’t be as calm as the night before, but given the random availability, I decide to give it a go.

The cost is $14 a night. It’s been 30 years since I last stayed in an established campsite. Things have changed, so how to pay is something of a mystery. I aim for the main building, which is basically just restrooms, only to discover there’s no place to pay there. It seems like that’s where you’d do things like that. Confused, I ask the “camp curator” who adopts an air of long suffering. Turns out there’s a credit card kiosk at the campground entrance. It’s small, brown, and designed to blend in. I’d completely missed it. Clearly, I’m an idiot.

First priority is to set up the Ready Light and aim its solar panel straight at the sun. It ran a lot more than I’d expected last night, and there was virtually no sun this morning. Hopefully there’s enough daylight left to bring it up to full charge.

Next is a quick lunch of cheese and crackers. It’s pushing 3:00 and this is the first food I’ve had since breakfast. I’ve only been sitting in Brother Blue all day, so I don’t need much before dinner, which will be early. Nevertheless a small snack is in order. After that I get to the business of setting up the tent. Last night I pitched on what might as well have been concrete. Today it’s … sand. I’m surprised. Deep sand. Of course, I don’t have sand stakes. I experiment enough to know the standard stakes that came with the tent are going to be entirely inadequate. Clearly I need to make allowances for this kind of thing in the future.

In the end I use large rocks to hold the stakes in place. It’s needed. As the sun sinks towards the surrounding hills, the wind is coming up. It’s strong and cold. I have to keep a good hold on the guylines to keep the tent from blowing away. Setting rocks on the guylines is probably not the best thing in the world for them, but I want to replace them with reflective cordage anyway, so I figure just this once it won’t make a difference. I just hope they hold. The wind is growing increasingly strong as the shadows lengthen.

As I’m working on the tent, a pickup pulls into the campsite next me me. Three men get out. One is at least ten years older than me, the other two at least twenty years younger. One of the younger men is big, loud, and friendly. He sees me, so he strikes up a conversation. He’s Mark, up from San Diego. He asks if I’m alone. When I say that I am, he says, “Right on” with a flat tone that means something else. I think he’s probably one of those extroverts who don’t understand solo travel. Pretty soon he’s inviting me over for dinner. Chicken Enchiladas. They have way more than they need.

I’ve encountered this in eras past. Outside of the big urban centers, people are open, friendly, inviting. Then, as now, every time someone invited me to their camp I was heartened. The human race isn’t quite entirely lost after all. All the anger, resentment, and suspicion seems locked up in the big cities which are, after all, extraordinarily unnatural constructs. The seem specifically designed to make us all crazy, to force us to be strangers among millions. Under other circumstances I would have accepted his offer. At the least, I would have joined them around their campfire, maybe shared some whiskey, certainly shared some stories.

But these are Covid times. Joining strangers for dinner seems unwise. I wouldn’t ever forgive myself if I went camping and dragged that damn bug home to my family. So I politely decline. I think his companions are relieved. It might be that Mark is the only one in the campground who isn’t playing by the Covid rules.

It’s fully dark by 5:00, so I fire up the Ready Light which is fully charged after all. I’m impressed. Old man winter is edging into the cutting wind, and I’m rapidly putting on one layer after another. Given the cold, I want hot food, so dinner is grilled ham and cheese, and tomato soup. It goes quickly. I’m cleaning up by 6:00. Since it’s there, I take my dishes over to the wash station at the main building. As I’m coming back, I can see my campsite across a sea of tents, trailers, and RVs. The Ready Light is by far and away the brightest thing in the place. It’s washing out Mark’s campfire. I suddenly realize I’m the asshole. Guilty, I race back to my campsite and put out the light. There is a time and a place for such things. That was a mistake.

It’s way too early for bed, so I settle into my camp chair, and I let the evening sink in. There’s a brilliant half moon up that dims the stars but also illuminates a thin river of clouds winding their way through the otherwise clear sky. Across the way, a dog is barking. Someone fires up a generator. Then a baby starts crying. I sigh, put my feet up on the picnic table, and just let the night do what its going to do. Nothing that’s happening in that campground is wrong or bad. If anything is out of place, it’s me. I probably shouldn’t be there at all.

The wind is getting stronger, and colder.

People keep coming into the campgrounds. More generators fire up. Clearly a lot of people are using this as a basecamp. They’re doing day trips into the park, but they already have a spot here all reserved and set up, so its okay to come back after dark. A young couple rolls in driving a Toyota sedan with an unfortunately sized Yakima cargo box perched precariously on top. They immediately fire up a lantern. It isn’t as bright as my Ready Light, but it’s still lighting up my campsite pretty good. I glance at my watch. 6:45. The generators are supposed to all shut down at 7:00. Despite the activity in the campground, it feels like it’s midnight.

People are continually walking by. They’re talking, low voices, trying to be polite, but it’s an intrusion nevertheless. I can’t help but compare that to the solitude last night. I don’t think staying in Mesquite Spring was a mistake; I need to see this just once to remember why I avoided places like this in eras past. Now I remember. I won’t be going back.

For a long time I just sit back, watch the cloud river, listen to the noises around me, and feel the growing wind. After a while, I’m cold enough that I think I might as well go to bed. It’s only 8:00. My summer-weight sleeping bag isn’t going to cut it tonight, but I brought a second bag so I can double up. It’s my daughter’s, which means it’s too short, but I can at least use it as a blanket. I head off, hoping that the neighbor’s light and the random noises won’t keep me up. At least the generators have stopped.

Later, my tent jerks, shudders, and violently shakes. It wakes me up. 10:30. I climb out to check my tent stakes. They’re holding. The wind has grown fierce. I’m a lousy judge of these things, but I think it’s running 20 – 30 mph. People have all disappeared inside their trailers, RVs, and tents except for the young couple next to me who are still up talking quietly. At least they’ve turned down their lantern.

The moon has moved, and the cloud river has thinned. The stars are brighter. I stand there a long moment, buffeted by the desert wind, soaking it in. But I’m only wearing sweats and the wind is clutching at me with icy fingers. I don’t mind the cold, but I do respect it. If I get chilled it’ll take a long time to warm up in my sleeping bag. Back to the tent, then, and sleep. Even despite the wind and the shuddering tent, it comes easily.

Day two has ended. I can’t imagine what day three will bring. The morning will decide for me.

6:15 and I’m wide away. The morning is overcast and a little windy. I’m surprised at how loud the tent is in the slight breeze, and I wonder if I got it pitched quite right the night before. It was only the second time I’ve ever set up this tent.

The tent is a four season black label tube tent from Hilleberg. It doesn’t offer much for views — I never imagined that I’d spend much time laying around in it — but the night before I left the vestibule rolled back and the inner tent unzipped. There were no bugs, rain, or wind to worry about. It wasn’t even particularly cold. As a result I have a morning view. I linger for a few minutes in my sleeping bag, taking it it.

It’s the sleeping bag that finally drives me from the tent. It’s an old mummy bag from my backpacking days. Now, here in this Jeep era, I find it annoyingly confining, and not at all nearly warm enough. The cold was pushing through in the pre-dawn light. It seems like I need to make an adjustment to the gear, although I’m not sure what I would replace it with.

The sun is shining off the mountains to the northwest when I emerge from the tent. It’s a peaceful scene, and it has its own harsh beauty. I have no real connection to the desert. It is utterly alien to the dense pine forests, sky blue waters, and brilliant white snowfields of my youth. But there is a barren beauty to this place. I might as well be on Mars, the landscape is that alien to my eyes, but still I’m relaxed and content to be there. It’s a nice place to be, although I don’t think I’d want stay overly long. But it is a reprieve from my normal life, and I welcome it for that.

A quick glance at the tent reveals what I suspected; I didn’t get it pitched tight enough. Even in the light wind, the outer rain fly is flapping against the inner tent. I resolve to do better tonight.

I pause to study the scene around me. The landscape is rock, devoid of life save a few scraggly, stubborn bushes. I kick at the ground and my boot just skids over the surface. Frowning, I take the shovel off my jeep and stab experimentally. The stones are tightly packed, and the steel simply scrapes along, refusing to dig. After a few minutes of bemused exploration in the surrounding rock field, I finally admit to what I suspected the night before. There won’t be any digging of cat holes here. For the first time I understand why the recent explosion in overlanding has given rise to a market for portable toilets. I don’t have one, but I think I could come to regret it if I’m not careful. Fortunately, I don’t have an actual need but I am mindful of the distance to the next restroom.

That said, I have nowhere to be and all day to get there. I enjoy the experience as I get to the business of making a rudimentary, if filling, breakfast. Normally my days are so loaded with todo lists that I know I’m behind schedule the minute I open my eyes. But this morning, the only thing I have to worry about is not burning the bacon. Its a luxurious feeling that leaves me in no kind of hurry at all.

The only sign of people are the small scattering of vehicles some distance up the road. It looks like there’s a tight grouping of camping spots there, or maybe a big spot with a group of people. It’s too far to see. After a while, a pickup truck slowly makes its way down the road and past my camp, its driver giving me a cheery wave. I’m just finishing up the breakfast dishes when another vehicle picks its way slowly down the road. It’s a van, and it slows to a halt next to my camp. The driver rolls down his window — a man of about my own age — and he says ‘hello’. I nod, and smile, and wander a bit closer to see what he wants. Not too close, though. I maintain my Covid distance. He points at my Ready Light, which I left set up the night before with the hopeful idea that the morning sun would charge it.

“Is that a solar panel?” he asks me.

I explain that it’s a solar-powered light, not that the morning overcast is doing it any favors. He smiles and agrees his own solar panels were next to useless this morning. We chat for a few moments and then, puzzled, I ask him if his van is a four wheel drive. It seems awfully low to the ground. “No,” he tells me with a rueful little smile, “just two wheel drive.” I express surprise that a two wheel drive van can make it up the road. He says he wouldn’t recommend it to anyone other than himself.

Amused, I tell him I get it, and I talk for a bit about exploring Northern Minnesota forest service roads in a Honda Civic. He laughs, agrees that it can be done, if you’re careful enough. “And willing to repair your suspension every year,” I add.

After a bit, he eases on down the road. I watch him pick his way along for a moment, shaking my head. Everyone has to ride their own ride. I didn’t ask, but I wonder if the crowded conditions in the park caught him as much by surprise as it did me. Was that what sent him up this road? Or was he looking for the solitude that I found almost by accident?

Later, I’ve got the camp completely torn down, except for my tent. I pay particular attention as I unscrew the lag screws that serve as tent stakes, and then fold the tent for transportation. I’m thinking about how to do this more efficiently, but also how to make it efficient to set it up again tonight. I don’t need to be fumbling with this thing twice a day. It want to be so good that I can set up and tear down blind folded.

Finally I’m on the road. It’s around 10 am and the high cloud cover has blow through, brightening the day. I didn’t bother to air down the night before, but I’m in 4-wheel high and I’ve got the sway bar disconnected. Brother Blue rolls along, not at all concerned by the rough, rocky ground under foot. For the most part this early section of the canyon road is reasonably flat with few ruts. Four wheel drive isn’t really necessary. Some ground clearance is important. Far more critical are reasonably rugged tires. The loose, sharp rocks in the road bed would tear street tires apart.

At the bottom of the road, just before West Side Road, I come to a particularly rutted section. I’m a little surprised that the park service didn’t smooth this out more, but then I wonder if it is left as a deliberate obstacle to keep passenger cars from leaving West Side. Brother Blue barely even notices the ruts, but I think back to my old Honda Civic. Would I have attempted this? I finally decide that I would have, but only if I was particularly anxious for a place to camp. I wonder how many Death Valley visitors have had to make that decision.

West Side Road is wide, flat, and well groomed with only the slightest of washboards. If I go left, I’ll back track the way I came the night before. If I go right, it’ll be all new. I pull up Gaia GPS. It looks like there’s more canyons and various points of interest along the big, easy road. I decide to go right.

The speed limit along West Side is a mystery, so Brother Blue just loafs along at around 25 mph. There are many stops to get out, to walk into the desert a bit, to soak in this place. One such place is Bennett’s Long Camp, which is nothing more than a marker on the side of the road. The marker says a group of forty-niners were stranded there for a month and almost starved to death. They only survived because two of their members made a journey on foot to San Fernando for help.

Later, after this trip is done, I’ll discover that the Bennett camp is probably where Death Valley’s name came from. They all thought they were going to die. Upon rescue, as the group was lead out over the Panamint Mountains, one of them looked back and said “goodbye, Death Valley.” It explains the marker, at least, although the deeper historical significance of the place is not mentioned on it.

The road to Butte Valley also turns up along the way. I’m surprised, because for some reason I thought that was in the north part of the park. Somewhere up that way is Barker Ranch where Charles Manson was captured. There are also scattered cabins and mining camps to visit. The road is as wide open and easy as West Side, but it probably doesn’t stay that way. I’m tempted to follow it all the way to Miner’s Cabin, but I resist the urge. I’ve told no one that I’m going that way. True, I have the inReach, but there’s such as thing as pushing your luck too far. Butte Valley will have to wait for another trip.

West Side goes on and on and on, and the needs of my body are making me increasingly uncomfortable. Maybe I should have gone left instead of right. Really, there isn’t much of anything here. I see some scattered people who look like they’ve been truck camping, but otherwise there are no crowds, no traffic, certainly no restrooms. My mistake. In my discomfort, I vow to invest in a portable toilet as soon as I get home.

Finally, a cut over to pavement opens to the right. Maybe another mile and I’m at two lane blacktop. Left or right? I look at the map and decide that my best bet is once again right. This time I luck out. A mile, maybe two, and I round a curve to see a distinct rectangular structure silhouetted on a hill top. Sure enough, it’s a pit toilet. The location is the Ashford Mill Ruins, which is set up as a picnic spot. The ruins are utterly deserted, but the pit toilet is open for business. And, really, has anyone ever gone a road trip and not felt the sweet relief of locating a toilet stop just as it is needed the most? It’ll be a long time before I forget about Ashford Mill, and not just because it’s a historically interesting place.

Ashford Mill was a gold ore processing plant that began and ended in 1914. All that’s left today are some empty walls, a concrete slab, a few random bits of iron. As I wandered around looking it over, it occurs to me that Ashford Mill’s story could easily be the same as any of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Silicon Valley start ups. It began and ended quickly, money was spent, virtually none was made. The only thing left in its wake was a scar on the land and some memories. The only difference between this place and Silicon Valley is that Silicon Valley is way better at recycling real estate.

Silicon Valley might be the last remaining gold rush town in North America, although what gets mined here is not gold. Ashford Mill explains it all. Get a vision, spend money, work like hell, and if it fails, fail hard. Never mind the wreckage left behind.

I wander back up the hill to the parking lot to discover two vehicles have joined me. Somehow I think their take on these ruins is nothing at all like mine.

From Ashford Mill, I turn north on Badwater Road. Truth be told, I’m a little confused as to what road I’m on. It seems like I should be on 190 heading back to Furnace Creek, but in reality I’m on Badwater. It’s not a substantial difference, I’ll end up at the same place either way, but it does show how tired I must have been the day before. I completely forgot that I’d turned off of 190 in my quest for a camp site. 190 ends somewhere far to the north east. There was never any chance that I could have come this far south and stayed on it.

The drive up Badwater is long. Traffic is spotty but present, with multiple RVs and slow moving minivans barely making the speed limit. Winding up the road, I’m struck by just how big this park is. At 5,000 square miles, it is larger than the two smallest US States (Rhode Island and Delaware). Puerto Rico is larger, but not by much. Distances are vast in the park, facilities are few and infrequent. The National Park Service makes it sound like flat tires are the most common cause of road break downs in the park. I’ve a hunch that running out of a gas is somewhere in the top five.

You don’t have to try very hard to find a whole bunch of empty in Death Valley, but if you want company all you have to do is go to one of the famous visitation sites in the park. I roll past Badwater Basin. It’s the lowest spot in North American (282 feet below sea level), but it is also world famous. The place is crawling with people. They’re wandering into the highway, so Brother Blue slips to a slow purr as we slip by. I came here multiple times in my Motorcycling Era, so it holds little interest for me. More, with Covid, I have no desire to share the attraction with hundreds of other people.

It is well past noon before  Furnace Creek is in our rear view mirror, and we’re north bound on North Highway. This leads to Scotty’s Castle which is another world famous destination, but it’s currently closed for renovation. Nevertheless, there are things up north that I want to check out. The first is Mesquite Spring. I can’t tell from the map what’s there, other than a campground.

Turns out, that’s pretty much it. There’s a Ranger Station. But that end of the park is really just Mesquite Spring Campground and Scotty’s Castle. Ubehebe Crater is there too, and the race track if you’ve got vehicle enough to get there. But it seems like the primary attraction is the campground and Scotty’s Castle. And the castle is closed. Past these handful of attraction, that there’s just endless miles of dirt road.

All the pavement is making me grumpy. I pick it up, passing two or three slower moving vehicles. I want to get to the end of this road and figure out where I’m going to go from there.

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.

It isn’t easy to start a new wandering era. First you have to get stuff with which to wander. Then you have to put it all together. I’ve had almost two years of excuses and illness and pandemic and forest fires to buy stuff. Now I have lots of stuff. It’s putting it all together that’s the tricky part.

So I took the day off to get ready; ready for the trip, ready for the new era. Once I get all the stuff together and organized, it’ll be easier to get out of town. But the first trip is always hard.

The first thing I did to Brother Blue was put a roof rack on him (Rhinorack Pioneer). That happened over a year ago. Mostly I wanted the rack for hauling long stuff home from the hardware store, should the need arise. But it’s certainly helpful for car camping. Jeep camping? I refuse to call what I’m doing overlanding.

Now I start my prep by putting Rotopax gas cans, a shovel, and a pair of traction boards on the rack. For what I intend to do in Death Valley, I don’t think I’ll need spare gas or traction boards. But as a matter of habit I want them with me. Call it paranoia if you want.

I’ve bought brackets for both the Rotopaxs and the traction boards, but I’ve never actually put them on the roof rack before. The traction board bracket goes up easily enough, although there’s a bit of assembly required. It’s the Rotopaxs that give me the problem. I had a plan. I swear I did. It was all clear enough in my head. The problem is when I went to execute the plan, I essentially performed a Three Stooges routine in solo.

The Rotopax bracket is actually one of the standard cargo racks that Rotopax sells. I have two. To hold stuff to the room rack, Rhinorack uses rectangular aluminum parts about an inch and a half long and a half inch wide. These are drilled to accept a screw. I have a beefy set that are used for tie-down eyelets. The aluminum parts are thick and heavy and I was planning on using them to hold the Rotopax brackets to the roof rack. Except now I realize I don’t have the right screws. And even if I did, they would never fit through the holes in the Rotopax brackets.

I head off to the hardware store where I discover I can get the right size screw, except way too long and way too thick. I spend a long time in the hardware aisle looking at screws, looking at what I have, thinking about what I need. I could kill myself. I should have done this last weekend. Somehow it just didn’t happen.

What would be helpful would be if I could find the aluminum rectangular thing tapped in a smaller screw size. I don’t even know what to call it. I stop a harried store employee and ask him if they sell stuff that like. I can’t see his face for his Covid mask, but his eyes peer at me wide and confused. He tells me he never saw anything like it before. He’s alarmed. Demands to know where I got it. Insists that they don’t sell anything like it, never have, never will. Then he rushes off to do hardware store things.

I look at the part in my hand, and I remember internet discussion threads in which people opine that what Rhinorack wants for things like this is way too much money. I scrape my foggy memory. They said you just have to go to some other department. I ponder this for a minute. I think it had something to do with electrical for some reason. Strut-something. Or something-strut. I dig out my phone and do a vague google search. Superstrut pops up. And Unistrut. I show my phone to another harried employee. “Do you have this?” He waves frantically off into the warehouse sized store, eyes wide above his mask. “Aisle three,” he mumbles before rushing off.

Aisle three. At the end. A spot maybe three feet long. It’s there. And parts, including something called a steel spring nut that’s close enough, except the spring is in the way. $5 for 5. The internet is right, Rhinorack charges a lot for the material.

I still have grocery shopping to do. And packing. And loading the Jeep. It’s 2:00. The day is wearing on. Maybe I should just leave the Rotopaxs behind, meaning no spare gas.

I am genetically incapable of this. I won’t do that on even a freeway-based road trip.

This sets me off on an entirely unfortunate mission that involves screws and Dremels and drilling and hammering and two trips to the hardware store. I’ll spare you the details. Suffice to say that I could have done the job cheaper and quicker if I wasn’t so tired, had spent last weekend focused on this, hadn’t been so distracted.

In the end I get the Rotopaxs up on the roof rack. it works but I’m bothered by what I’ve done. I’ve assembled the whole thing in exactly the same way that Rhinorack shows on their website, only I spent maybe $10 (and a bunch of time) to do what they charge $23 (and no time) to do. But Rotopax cans have detents right where the screws heads are, and I’m pretty sure these are making contact. I don’t have time to mess with it, but it bothers me. How much rubbing is there going to be? I have no time for creeping elegance. I let it go and get on with everything else.

Grocery store, packing, clothes, tent, sleeping bags….. the stuff comes together from all corners of the house, is sorted, assembled, organized, and loaded. Except for a half hour for dinner, it takes me until past 9 pm to get Brother Blue put together. I’m stumbling around, wanting a nap. I’m making three trips when one would do. Maybe I’m making excuses. Maybe I just shouldn’t go. It’s all taking way too much time. If I’m going to wander routinely, this has to happen faster. Way, way, faster.

But at last I’m ready. Death Valley is more than 8 hours away and I want to get there well before dark. The alarm clock is going off at 5 am. I get to bed. I’ve a long day driving ahead of me.

“So what prompted that?” my brother would later ask. It was a good question, and a simple one. I wish I had a simple answer. In fact, the reason is as complicated as the ebb and flow of my life.

Once upon a time, I used to sleep in a tent quite often. When I was a teenager, it was Boy Scouts. As a 20-something, it was solo backpacking along Lake Superior’s North Shore. In my early 30’s, it was motorcycle camping all over the Western United States. Different camping activities for different eras in my life. My circumstances would change and so too would the nature of my wanderings in the great outdoors. But the outdoors were a constant presence in my life.

But then I got married, and the babies came, and I thought we would camp as a family. It was only then that I realized my wife loathes the very idea. Her idea of roughing it is three stars instead of four. So the family era blew by like a tornado. There were birthday parties and soccer games and swimming meets and volleyball and family vacations and shopping … so much shopping … but whatever wandering I did outdoors was infrequent … and without the family.

Not that I didn’t want to wander. It’s just that I had other priorities. The long era without a tent was so long that it’s no surprise people assumed I was done with all of that.

But one age ends and another begins. The kids got older, one left for college, the other started classes in a local community college, and I just wasn’t needed as much any more. At the same time, the F150 I’d used for all those family years was getting long in the tooth. I waged an internal debate with myself: What should I replace it with, what did I want from that vehicle, what did it have to do? Among many many requirements, the most important one was this: it had to enable me to wander.

I’ll spare you the agony of that long internal debate. In early 2019 I found myself broken down yet again on the side of the road. Irritated, I’d had enough. So I put the debate away, and I dumped the pickup in favor of a Jeep Wrangler JLU Rubicon. And then I promptly came up with excuses why I couldn’t go wandering.

I really can’t explain the dithering. To be sure, there were nameless fears and all the wrong kinds of inertia. Beyond that, there were job pressures and family pressures and, honestly, I really wasn’t feeling well. I was badly overweight. And there was a cough that wouldn’t go away. Every time I attempted exercise, I ended up doubling over practically passing out. As the year went on, the problem got progressively worse. The doctors I saw about it didn’t help. They certainly didn’t explain. Until, finally, in early 2020 I found a doctor who gave me a correct diagnoses: adult on-set asthma. She gave me an inhaler and told me to use it twice a day, no missing.

It worked. The cough went away, and a true miracle it was too. I immediately set out to lose at least ten pounds by walking it off. Three pounds down, and I got slammed by gout. I no sooner found out why my foot was swollen agonizingly to three times it’s normal size when the whole damn world got locked down due to Covid. Like everyone in every corner of the planet, 2020 was off to a truly shitty start.

Those were dark days.

But a funny thing happened in those early weeks of the pandemic. I couldn’t really do anything because I couldn’t walk. And even if I could go out, there was no where to go. But dealing with the gout meant changing my diet which resulted in unexpected weight loss. Two pounds, week after week after week. Eventually the foot got better, and then I got a jump rope, and a kettlebell, and I started putting myself back together again, and all of a sudden I was 30 pounds down. It was summer, and the Covid rate was barely above pandemic levels. Things were looking up. I started to plan a first camping trip with the Jeep… Modoc County was calling to me.

But then all of California turned into an apocalyptic forest fire hellscape. I exercise outside in these Covid times. Now the air quality was about as good as the mouth of an industrial smokestack. And I have asthma. I had to no choice but to sit down and ride it out. Weeks went by. Then months. The fires wouldn’t stop.

But that wasn’t enough. No. There was the presidential election, which was no one’s idea of fun. Silicon Valley social media turned their algorithms on high — the ones designed to piss everyone off, and so keep eyeballs glued to their site. So of course everyone was on edge.

Somehow summer drifted into fall but it seemed like things were only getting worse. Work was no better. Simultaneously, all at once, three different departments at work, none of them my own, slammed me with, uh, “surprises” that left me stressed, sleepless, and, frankly, rather unpleasant to be around. Finally, one night, after a midnight call with people 12 time zones away, I stared out the dark window in my home office, and I felt the walls closing in, and the ceiling was pressing down, and the pulse was booming in my ears. I was distracted. Inefficient. Forgetful. The simplest things were looming large and impossible. None of it made any sense.

I used to laugh. I wasn’t laughing anymore.

Really. 2020 was the worst year of my life. My guess is it was pretty rock bottom for you too. I know that plenty of people had it far worse than me. People knew illness, people knew economic ruin, people knew death. I actually had it good in comparison. Even so, I don’t want a do-over.

Sitting there in my dark office, late at night, exhausted, I looked at weather reports, and I looked at a map, and I looked at a calendar, and all the noise and excuses fell to silence. Fuck it, I thought, I’m going to Death Valley.

Time to wander again.