Death Valley, CA

The Friday before Easter, Matt emailed me at 10am and said he would be getting off early at 2. I called him at noon and said…hey, how about Death Valley this weekend? We had been wanting to go, and knew it would be too hot to bear before too long. I threw all our hiking/camping bins haphazardly in the back of the Xterra, and off we went. We camped the first night at Stovepipe Wells, simply because it was the first thing we got to, and it was already 10pm.

We woke early the next morning and immediately made our way to the Mesquite Sand Dunes for sunrise, with coffee in hand. It was gorgeous.

After that, we did a 4 mile hike up Mosaic Canyon, which we found to be somewhat underwhelming. Oh well.

Next up was the drive to Ubehebe (ha!) Crater, where we took a sweet hike around the rim. The crater is up at 5k ft, so it was a nice respite from the heat.

Later in the afternoon, we made our way down to the famous Badlands salt flats, at 282ft below sea level. Crazy, crazy landscape.

We camped at Texas Springs, just above Furnace Creek that night. The campground itself was pretty lame (basically a giant gravel parking lot) but there were only a couple other campers there, and the surroundings were great so we enjoyed it. We cooked steak over a charcoal fire, took a sunset stroll, and enjoyed (for the first time in our poor, deprived Northwest lives) sleeping with no fly on our tent, perfectly warm and looking at the starts.

The next morning we got up even earlier and made coffee/watched the sunrise at Zabriskie point. After sunrise, we drove up to Dante's View. It’s at 5k ft and looks down over the badlands and the entire valley, which is a pretty crazy view. We did a cool 5 mile ridge hike from there, and then made our way home to LA.

Overall, we loved Death Valley. A few days is plenty, though we could have spent more. There was tons of varied and interesting scenery and lots of short hikes, though nothing very long. It hit an amazing 103 on Saturday afternoon, so we were glad we hadn't waited any longer.