Another day, another canyon... I had originally hoped to do a long obscure one, but we woke up with legs still tired from the previous day's bike ride. So, let's do a “normal” hike: one that is on the map, with an actual trailhead at a parking lot. We headed towards Desolation Canyon.
Desolation Canyon. Isn't Death Valley full of great names? In this case, “desolation” refers to the relative lack of vegetation. Certainly not to a lack of people, as we did see a few other hikers here. We enjoyed working our way up the drainage, as usual.
And of course, we couldn't resist poking into some of the side drainages, even though someone had carefully marked them as the "wrong way" by placing lines of small rocks across their mouths. This is clearly not the wrong way for some of us :)
The walk through the canyon walls was punctuated by the sound of airplanes overhead. Chad peered up
and noticed that the air base nearby must have been doing refueling exercises.
Unlike many canyon hikes, this one was benign enough to allow us to make it all the way to the rim at the top.
We enjoyed the view.
You may notice that some of the rocks seem rather colorful; this canyon cuts through the same soft colorfully mineralized deposits that make up nearby Artist's Drive.
On the way back down to the parking lot, Chad asked "Is that a wagon train?" I thought I misheard him, but sure enough, there was an honest-to-goodness wagon train turning from the main road onto the side road to the parking area. Hmmm.
It turns out that we coincided with an annual pioneer reenactment event. The wagons had been on the road for about a week, and were reaching their final destination where we had parked just as we were finishing up our hike. Given that the access road to the parking lot was quite narrow, we were essentially boxed in and had to wait for the whole train to arrive before we could leave. We took that as an excuse to be spectators as the wagons worked their way up to the top and circled into their camping configuration. How jolly.
Even with this diversion to watch the wagons, we had a little time on the way back to our camping spot back in Greenwater Valley to take in the view at Zabriskie Point. Since this was a busy viewpoint, we masked up
before enjoying the scenery.
Back at camp, we enjoyed our return to solitude with martinis (note the excellent stainless steel martini glasses),
and Chad whipped up dinner as the light waned on another enjoyable day in the desert.
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