Friday, we drove to Rhyolite Ghost Town near Beatty. It is one of the most extensive of the non-commercial ghost towns that we have seen. This could be because it was built late in the mining era. Most of the mines in Arizona we saw were developed in the 1870s and 80s, but Rhyolite was not founded until 1904.
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| Rhyolite Ghost Town |
There was a little museum at the base of the town that promoted local arts.
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| Last Supper by A. Szuskalski |
Saturday, we went to the Golden Nugget Casino in Pahrump. After playing for about half an hour, Joan had run her $5 down to about 45 cents. She moved to another machine, and in a couple of plays, she had won $20. We decided that luck like that wouldn't happen again any time soon, wo it was time to quit.
Monday, we did a road trip to Shoshone, about 30 miles west in California. We started at the Shoshone Museum, which is by donation. It is an interesting little museum. One of the main displays was a reconstruction of part of a mammoth, from bones found nearby in the mud of the ancient Tecopa Lake, created by ash from the volcanoes in the area. They had casts of hoof prints from prehistoric camels, and other animals. There was also an extensive display highlighting women pioneers in Death Valley. Outside there was a display, starting from the oldest to the newest of the various types of rock found in the area.
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| Artifacts at Shoshone Museum |
From the museum, we walked across the highway to the cemetery. It is an unusual one, in that it wraps around the base of a little hill at the junction of Dublin Gulch and the main valley. We continued up Dublin Gulch to the cave homes, carved out of the mud hills on each side of the gulch.
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| Cave Houses at Dublin Gulch |
After walking up the gulch for about a mile, we returned to do the historic walking tour of the town, the highlight being Charles Brown Market. The Brown family continues to be an active family in the community. Behind the motel, we found the tortoise pond, quite by accident, because it had the remains of an old chimney at one end. There were at least 5 tortoises. We thought they might be statues until we saw them moving.
We stopped at the Crowbar for a drink, and planned on having a sandwich and French onion soup. However, they were out of the soup, so had nachos instead. Usually it is Joan's choice that they have run out of. The nachos were made from a quite tasty, light chip. The chicken breast sandwich was nice, as it was made from unprocessed chicken.
We waited until Tuesday to do a drive through Death Valley, because until then the temps were going up to 100F, and the forecast for today was 83F, much better. The woman at the museum in Shoshone said she had lived there, and had temps up to 130F. Yikes. We headed off around 8:00 AM, through Shoshone then over Salisbury Pass (3315ft el), down again, then over Jubilee Pass (only 1290 ft), then down into the valley to the site of Ashford Mill (-100 ft el). It was overcast as we were coming over the hills, and we even had a few drops of rain. Might have to worry about the sign warning about flash floods for the next 55 miles. Further along Badwater Road, we followed a vehicle into a parking lot, which had no signage. It looked like a trailhead, as there were several cars there, and we could see people heading into the canyon. Since we didn't know what the attraction was, we headed back to Badwater Road. The temperature, according to the truck was 30C, so the cooler weather didn't arrive today. We continued to Badwater Basin which is the lowest point in the continental USA. Across the basin is Telescope Peak, which is about 11,000 ft. Quite an elevation difference.
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| Sea Level sign is on the hill by the arrow |
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| Panamint Mountains across Badwater Basin |
Further along, we took the 1.5 mi bad washboard road to the Natural Bridge parking lot. The signboard describing the trail was missing one bit of information, the distance to the bridge. We walked the 2/3 mile route up the canyon past the Natural Bridge until we got to an area where the rock would be slippery to climb up to the next level of the canyon. There are some interesting dry waterfalls in several places. It would be really impressive to be looking down into this canyon during a real rainstorm, if such a thing exists with the 2 inches of rain a year that Death Valley gets.
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| Natural Bridge |
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| End of canyon |
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| Salt flats in the valley through the Natural Bridge |
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Next stop was on Artists Drive. It was so windy walking up to a viewpoint that we had to be extra careful walking. Beautiful colors in the hills, particularly at the hill called Artists Palette. The variety of colors of rock visible in these hills is just incredible.
Once we finished Artists Drive, we headed out of the valley toward Death Valley Junction. There were still some impressive structures on that route.
Near Death Valley Junction, we saw trailers boon-docking at 'Ryan' on concrete pads. We checked this site out when we got back to the trailer. The pads were probably built for a company town for the borax mines in Death Valley. It even sewer hookups, but they are not functional anymore.
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