We woke up freezing this morning in our mountain cabin up above Big Pine, CA. The cabin itself is beautiful, and in a location I’d love to spend days in. But the stove heater went out in the night, and their water pump went out this morning, so showers and toilets were in short supply, to say nothing of the catastrophe that was no coffee. But the roaring brook next right out front of the cabin (which provides its water and its electricity!) was stunning. And made the perfect sound to sleep to.
We drove down into Big Pine for a breakfast diner that was pretty perfect and then got on the road. We took a back road from Big Pine into Death Valley that passed back into Inyo National Forest, but through a much more arid and rocky part of it. We climbed up the rocky edge of the valley and then plunged down an incredibly steep grade into the center of the park. It is… unfathomably large. With mountains on both sides and an expanse of rocks and rubble in the middle, you can see for what feels like hundreds of miles except for when the mighty dust storms pick up.
Today was a “drive and admire” day, mostly. The views were spectacular, and so were the roads… most of the time. We did end up on an almost hour long stretch of washboard gravel. It was horrible. We noticed there were lots of tracks up on the shoulders, so we used that to bypass some of the worst of it, but that introduced a very disconcerting rotation of the horizon. I was fairly certain that it was possible that I wouldn’t not roll my 4Runner.
We got out and hiked around the trail at Titus Canyon, around an old sulfur mine, and saw the car parts in the dirt at Crankshaft Junction. The scenery was spectacular, but we all felt a strangely liberating and haunting feeling of being the only people around. In the entire day, driving over 120 miles, we may have only passed a dozen cars, and didn’t see any people anywhere.
This evening, we headed into Beatty, Nevada to stay at the Stagecoach Inn and Casino. It’s quite a show. The Denny’s in the lobby is apparently the only restaurant in town that was open. It seems odd to me that the only town next to a National Park, a town with its own 24-hour tire and tow shop, has only this one restaurant, but it was at least convenient. Then we hit the Blackjack tables just to say we did.
I’m proud to say that I played the roller coaster up and down, starting with my $20, and finished at $21 having had some free drinks and been able to tip out the dealer, so that’s a win in my book. Then we went back to the rooms to watch Clue because for some reason we had been quoting it all day on the radios, but none of us made it through more than the first ten minutes.