Our Death Valley Christmas

Death Valley was a lot of fun over Christmas!

I was really surprised by two things: 1) How commercial Death Valley has become, and 2) How many people were there over the holiday. I was imagining a remote and desolate wilderness National Park. What we discovered instead was a National Park with several resorts and ranches and restaurants and even it's own airport. We also expected to be pretty much the only people in the park but were surprised when we discovered that thousands of people (many of them Japanese tourists) had the same idea that we did to spend Christmas in Death Valley.

The campgrounds were still mostly empty but in the end it didn't matter. We went to unpack the tent and discovered that the bag that was supposed to contain the tent only contained the tent poles and the rain fly. Oops. We briefly considered sleeping under the stars (Rosey more so than I) but I was concerned that we wouldn't sleep well and that it would prevent us from enjoying our hiking during the day if we were too tired.


Luckily, I was able to snatch up the last available hotel room in the Stovepipe Wells motel inside the park. In the end it worked out nicely. With overnight temperatures in the 30's, it was much nicer to come home to a warm hotel room and the end of the day.

We actually didn't have as much time as we had hoped to explore the park. The winter sun set in the valley at about 4:30 pm leaving us with very little daylight to explore the park. On our first night there, we decided to do some night hiking and explored some sand dunes near where we were staying. It was a fun and unique experience to be trudging through sand dunes when it was so dark that you couldn't see 10 feet in front of you (the moon was just a sliver in the night sky). It probably would have been a little dangerous were it not for my GPS that guaranteed that we couldn't get too lost.

The next morning we got up and drove out to the "The Racetrack". It's a dry lake bed where some rocks have left a path in the dried mud from their movement. The rocks don't really move very fast, but every year the freezing and thawing of the mud pushes them a little in one direction or another. It leaves a really eery impression that the rocks are moving on their own.


Unfortunately the only access to the racetrack is via a 27 mile long roughly graded rocky dirt road. A sign at the beginning of the road recommends that it only be traversed with a high clearance 4x4 vehicle. Although I wouldn't have thought twice about driving my Harley down this kind of road, it was causing me pain every time that I heard a rock thud on the underside of my brand new 2007 Camry. Let's face it, Camry's are just not meant to be offroad vehicles. But I knew that Rosey really wanted to see the racetrack, so we drove it anyway. I'm hoping that I didn't do any permanent damage to the car... the shocks feel like they took a pretty good beating.


In the afternoon, we pulled over to the side of the dirt road and just started hiking through an undeveloped area of the park. That's one of the things that I love about Rosey... she likes to just get out and explore. I never would have thought to stop in that spot but it ended up being pretty cool. There were a ton of Joshua trees and a bunch of other desert flora and fauna that we discovered. Our short exploration took us up to the top of a small peak (about a thousand feet of elevation gain) where we could survey the valley beneath us. We both decided that we wanted to come back to this spot at some point in the future and explore some more.


We rounded out the day by stopping at Scotty's Castle in the park. It was this huge castle/house that was built by some guy who had a ton of money and loved the desert. It was much cooler than I expected.


We cooked Christmas Eve dinner over a campfire. We didn't actually have our own campsite but we snuck into the campground and used the firepit from one of the many vacant sites. Our Christmas Eve dinner consisted of Ginger Teriyaki glazed salmon, Cheddar Broccoli rice and fresh steamed vegetables with a dessert of fresh Death Valley dates. Yum!


After dinner we opened one gift from each other in front of the fire. I had already given Rosey my "big" gift (a pair of cross country skis) so I brought along a smaller gift for her to open. She really like the new camelbak hydration pack that I got her and I loved the air hockey table that she got for me. Of course, she didn't actually bring the air hockey table with her to Death Valley. In fact, we didn't even have it back at home... it was still on order from Sears. But she brought along a computer printout of the model that she bought and that was good enough for me :)

On Christmas morning we slept in a little bit and then I cooked us breakfast in our hotel room. We had planned on camping so I had all of our food in a cooler and brought along a gas powered backpacking stove to cook with. I doubt that the hotel would have been thrilled to learn that we were cooking over an open flame in the hotel room, but it didn't stop us anyway :)

We had some time to kill on the way out of the park, so we hit a few more of the sight-seeing stops. Zabriskie point is one of the most beautiful desert sights that I've ever seen. It was especially beautiful lit up in the Christmas morning light. We descended from the point into the wash and got one last short hike in before our long drive back home to Spanish Fork.


It was definitely a Christmas to remember :)

The rest of the pictures are here.