Death Valley: Ghost towns, Thimble Peak, & an abbreviated Star Wars tour

Death Valley is the land of the Kawaiisu & Northern Shoshone (Newe) according to native-land.ca (as always, with their disclaimer that the map is not perfect). There is actually a land acknowledgment on the park entrance signs for the Timbisha Shoshone tribe, which seems like it should be the bare minimum required of all national parks! Beyond acknowledgments, the history (including more recent history) is outlined here—How the Timbisha Shoshone Got Their Land Back, which is very worth the read.

We were fortunate to stay with friends inside the park, so we could maximize our time in the expansive 3.4 million acres of park. As a side note, I would not recommend staying in the dumpy, dusty city of Pahrump if you can avoid it. Even the gas stations are more dismal than run-of-the-mill. It is one of those places that made my skin crawl & I couldn’t quite articulate why. The “vaginal rejuvenation” billboards didn’t help, nor the fact that the town (temporarily) made it illegal for businesses to speak any language other than English. Yuck & yuck.

Anyway…just drive through.

Our friends took us to Mosaic & Grotto Canyons near Stovepipe Wells to explore & scramble on our first afternoon in the park. Mosaic is named for the artistic, tiny angular fragments of various types of parent rock locked within a natural cement & involves minimal scrambling. The road to nearby Grotto isn’t obvious & I certainly wouldn’t take a rental car (or our Subaru for that matter) up it. Also, if you aren’t into scrambling, you won’t get far on that one. I definitely needed some assistance, especially on the way down. Both canyons were lovely & enjoyable, but the shadowy light did not make for easy photographs.

The next morning was legit cold, but I was bound & determined to wrap up in blankets to sit in the outside hammock & read. It didn’t last long. When the weather warmed up a little, we drove to Rhyolite Ghost Town. The town isn’t technically in Death Valley, but entirely worth the trip if it fits into your itinerary. There are remnants of this old mining town including a portion of the bank, jail, the restored Bottle House, and a very intact & somewhat eerie train station. It felt a little like the set of Westworld after the hosts destroyed it.

Also located here is the quirky & unexpected Goldwell Open Air Museum which includes a tiny, inside museum (museum is a generous term) and outdoor art installation. The outdoor art includes a ghostly Last Supper, a naked Lego woman, some creepy burlap sack people, and a flowery, mosaic couch. I’m sure there is a Wikipedia page & a documentary, but I was glad to experience the place without much background knowledge (other than its existence which our Death Valley friends informed us of). We bought a magnet. I could have stayed longer.

Then we continued on our day trip down Titus Canyon Road, a one-way gravel road which starts out mild before a series of potholes and progressive twists & turns. I drove so I wouldn’t vomit. Car-sickness-prone individuals beware. At the top of Red Pass (not the first “pass” where we tried to randomly start hiking into the sagebrush), we stopped to find an unmarked trail. It was miserably nippy & blustery on the pass, but we were happy we kept hiking upwards in our down coats. The trail was easy to follow even with a skiff of snow & the wind soon died down. Ryan even got down to a tank top.

We realized the trail continued up Thimble Peak (the trail is listed as Thimble Peak trail on the map), but the peak looked impossible from our angle & shadows. Well, sure enough, it was very easy to access the summit, & it was one of those semi-rare summit situations where it is the warmest and calmest part of the hike. We were beyond thrilled to be on top of a relatively low-effort summit looking down 6500+ feet below us into the vastness of Death Valley. And all in the middle of January. My heart!

We were pleasantly surprised by our little adventure & then continued down the nausea-inducing gravel road until reaching the last leg of limestone cliffs towering above us. The cliff walls at their narrowest are around 20 feet wide. Really, this road reminded me a little of Nepal in places except in Nepal there would be two-way traffic and small buses.

It was a phenomenal day, completed with pollo asado tacos and too much red wine. We watched A New Hope in preparation for our next day, but I was exhausted and kept dozing off. Ryan certainly watched every minute.

Our last morning, we began our abbreviated Star Wars tour by wandering barefoot at the Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes. We could also see Thimble Peak from here which is in the background of the movie as well. I have no idea why people were wandering around the warm (but not scorching) sand in shoes. Also, side note, your car is going to be filthy after visiting Death Valley no matter what. Also, it’s super soft sand. Go barefoot!

Of course we went to Badwater Basin, which is the Death Valley destination as the lowest point in North America, sitting at 282 feet below sea level. We got our obligatory selfie by the sign & then wandered a while aimlessly along the path in the salt flats. The color red looks especially stark against the white landscape & I actually loved the scattered ant appearance of all of the people drifting forward on the path even though there is no particular end point.

Lastly we stopped at Zabriskie Point & took one of the well-trodden (social) trails climbing up instead of through the curious badland-y yellow hills, looking down on the place where Luke Skywalker was ambushed by the sand people. The eroding dirt-rock is slippery, so the tread on our tennis shoes weren’t ideal for this short excursion. We had the path to ourselves. In fact, though this was busy season in the park, we really didn’t encounter many people or droids.

There are so many sights to see at Death Valley, but we felt we packed in a good chunk in our one full day, two half-ish days there. Then we headed back to Vegas—which, you can totally do a long day trip from Vegas to Death Valley if you are limited on time. We listened to the audiobook of Running with Sherman (which we still haven’t finished) about running with burros, which was an appropriate story to entertain us home.