36.42479, -116.92585
Last night’s sunset was matched by an equally colorful sunrise.
I continued north along the Westside road, which, just as the name implies, runs along the west side of Badwater Basin.
Despite it being a fairly-well maintained 2WD road, there was little traffic, maybe one car per hour. Most of the side roads leading up into the Panamints were washed out in last fall’s flooding, so maybe that has depressed traffic. If so, the jeeper’s loss is my gain.
There were a number of side attractions such as old graves, an old borax works, a supposed well that I could not find. None of these were really very interesting and hardly worth the time spent looking for them or at them.
After 5 or 6 miles the road takes a turn to the east to rejoin the main highway. That’s where I set my cache, which I recovered with little trouble. From here, the route to Stovepipe is all cross-country.
The first couple miles of this were fine, but then I encountered much rougher footing. The ground alternated between soft dry mud, where I sank in 2-3 inches with every step, and hard sharp spikes of salty mud. The former was a slow hot slog, the latter a slow hot tiptoe around and over the spikes. Both were exhausting, and my only relief was occasional stretches of salt pan, which made for easy walking. One of these had faint but unmistakeable tracks of a mother and cub mountain lion, which was something of a surprise.
After several miles of this I reached the first of the alluvial fans spreading out from Tucki Mountain. I expected easier going but found it just as hard, although hard in a different way. The fans are really just a jumble of loose round rocks ranging from baseball to basketball in size. There is no flat ground in between the rocks, so it is all walking on loose, unstable, uneven rock surfaces. The rocks tended to be a bit smaller lower down on the fan, so that is where I tended to stay.
So the going was not nearly as easy as a scan of the topo map would suggest–there is basically no elevation gain or loss. The hiking was harder than I expected. But I finished the day without falling, or twisting anything, or trashing my shoes (lightweight trail runners, not sturdy leather boots) or slicing up my shins on the spikes. So I guess it was a good day.
