Tuesday Jun 11 2002
Time for a camping trip to Death Valley! We headed north out of Orange County on I-15. Three hours later we had lunch at the Mad Greek restaurant in Baker, the most well known pit stop between L.A. and Vegas, and home of the world’s tallest thermometer.
At Baker we drove north on highway 127, and cautiously drove near the Southern California law enforcement officials doing the Baker to Vegas charity run.
We drove around Death Valley for the day, did some small hikes, visited the Furnace Creek Inn and walked around and ended up that evening in Furnace Creek for dinner, then headed north and camped at Stovepipe Wells for the night.
I had read about the “Racetrack Playa”, a huge lake bed with a large rock formation in the center. Discovery Channel and Learning Channel, (back when TLC was cool), occasionally feature stories about the lake bed’s “moving rocks” which moved across the lake bed leaving trails. Experts weren’t sure exactly how it happened, other than speculating wind pushed them when there was a layer of moisture on the lake bed. Of course other quasi credible folks assumed it was aliens doing some mischief, but we thought it would be a cool place to check out.
Racetrack playa is only accessible via a 40 mile dirt off next to the Ubehebe Crater, (follow the signs). After an hour of driving on a washboard dirt road we came to then end where we saw the huge dry lakebed and the enormous rock formations known as the “grandstands”
Wiki page with satellite image
Seeing this picture you can totally see the proportion and immensity of desert. You can see me standing to the right of the highest rock, just below the line where the lakebed meets the mountains.
That afternoon we visited Scotty’s Castle, a castle in the remote Death Valley desert built last century by Walter Scott.
We drove down into Nevada and headed to Las Vegas on highway 160, got a room at the MGM. After a well needed hot shower we ate a huge buffet dinner and headed back to Orange County the next day.