3/12 - 3/15/05 The Long Way to Lone Pine

3/13 - After our morning solar astronomy session at Indian Cove, I thanked Fred again & said good-bye. Then we finished packing up & headed off for Death Valley. But this adventure would start with a side trip. I've known about the California Poppy Preserve near Lancaster for several years, though never had the opportunity to see it. This year, with the abundance of wildflowers elsewhere in this part of the country, I decided the opportunity was not to be missed. It was only a couple of hours out of the way.

As we climbed up the SR247 grade north out of Yucca Valley & I noticed the transmission temperature gage getting close to the "yellow" zone before we leveled out & started the long descent into the Lucerne Valley, where we passed another Granite Dells type formation. Hmmm... We picked up SR18 headed west toward Victorville, then Palmdale with the snow clad San Gabriels off to the left. Coming into Palmdale, I started thinking there must be a better route, as we waded through the traffic of mile after mile of strip malls, what I think of as the worst of Southern Cal & why I call it the beast. All the way to the center of town before finally striking north on SR14 , a freeway that got us out of the mess. Lancaster is only a few miles farther, then it's 15 miles west out Avenue I to the preserve.

You know well before you arrive that you're in poppy country as the hills start to take on a golden tinge. Then it looks like orange airbrushing across the landscape, finally culminating in fields with intense orange waves of poppies, mixed in with lupine & other flowers. The word was out. It looked like that last scene in Field of Dreams, with a steady procession of cars, vans, motorcycles & us moving through the pastoral hills. People will come.

Words cannot do the poppies justice. I tried to capture the experience in images & I hope the slide show conveys some sense of it. With Gypsy in tow, it was not possible for us to park within the preserve, so we parked just outside along the road & walked into the fields of poppies. Timmy loved it. I'm sure the visitor center is nice & I know we missed out on some of what there was to see, but a lot of the preserve is accessible from the roadside. Many people were taking advantage of that, probably at least as many as paid to go in the "front door". If you're within driving distance, try to take this in. There is a poppy festival in the middle of April, but this year's bloom may peak before then.

It was mid-afternoon, as we headed back to Lancaster & then north again. Death Valley was looking like too much for one day, so we ideal headed for Red Rock Canyon State Park, only about an hour away. Maybe we could overnight there. As it turned out we got the last site in the park, a marginal one at best that had not been properly restored from the winter runoff damage. But we got in with no problems & had time for a brief look around. We were parked just beneath a wall of soft sandstone that has been sculpted by rains to resemble either a Buddhist temple (Ankor Wat comes to mind) or a medieval cathedral (think Cologne or Chartres). Similar walls stretched away to both north & south. See our

In the morning we drove around a little for pictures of some of the more colorful park features. Then we did the dump thing & headed north again. We took the Panamint Valley route toward Death Valley, passing alkali lakes and the mining town of Trona, which looks like a ghost town in the making despite the large mineral processing facilities there. The Panamint Mountains to the east were very impressive, with the ideal tops frosted with snow. I kept looking at that wall of mountains & thinking "Where is the pass?"

Eventually we turned east on SR190, almost immediately starting up a long grade with no pass in sight. As the grade got steeper, I was watching the transmission temperature closely & slowing to try to keep it down. It seemed to be holding, then as the grade increased, we started to lose power & the temperature popped up. I wanted to make the pullout just a hundred yards ahead, but eBoy gave out with a smoky cloud of transmission fluid. Not good! It turned out there was another disabled RV a mile ahead & the nearest tow service was 60 miles away, so we weren't going anywhere soon.

Five hours later we found ourselves in Lone Pine, CA,100 miles from our destination, camping in the Miller's Towing parking lot. An interesting note is that we had been headed for the lowest point in the US & we ended up at the foot of Mt. Whitney, the highest point in the lower 48. There is probably no cosmic significance to that, but in the wisdom of Forrest Gump, "You never know what you're going to get."

On the plus side, I have a great fondness for the Sierras, having backpacked in them many times over the last 30 years. I have never seen the east flank of the southern Sierra. The tantalizing glimpses as we entered the Owens Valley at dusk have me thinking we'll take this opportunity to check out this part of the Sierras before having another go at Death Valley. But first, there is the small matter of eBoy's transmission...

3/15 - We dodged a bullet (no pun intended on eBoy's brand name). It seems our vintage of Dodge diesel automatic trannies has a weak link where the fluid line connects to the cooler & the line may leak or pop off if things get hot. When the fluid spewed out on the Panamint grade, things appear to have shut down before the transmission was damaged. The repair bill was under $400 rather than the $2000 I had feared. Plus the work was done the same day, as opposed to taking a week. I had put up the satellite dish in Miller's lot & gone to work in the morning. By mid-afternoon we were moving to Diaz Lake County Park, south of town to set up camp for the night. It's a rather nice lakeside park, with the wall of the Sierra to our west & across the lake, the Inyo Mountains.

It's rather brisk here at night & it's been very windy, so I'm inclined to try to have another go at Death Valley sooner rather than later. The trick is to fit the 100 mile run over 2 major grades into my work schedule, allowing 4 hours to get to Furnace Creek. I'm thinking about making it in 2 stages, first to Panamint Springs over the first grade after work today & then try again for the main grade tomorrow, probably early in the morning. This will also be a good test of eBoy, while we're still not too far from service.

Running update from Panamint Springs: we made it in a little over an hour & are camped at the RV park, half way to our goal. The grade wasn't too bad going up, less than 2000' higher than Lone Pine. It was a little hairy coming down, very steep & winding. I stayed in second gear most of the way down, even using first for the worst mile. I plan to start out tomorrow by 7 AM, taking on the main grade while it's still cool & taking our time. We didn't disconnect tonight, just leveled up still hitched to expedite our getaway.

The stretch we covered today includes some of the most desolate terrain we've seen: moonscapes in some sections. There are also microclimates where the Mojave ecosystem is announced by the presence of Joshua Trees. Here at the Springs the desert is quite rough, but we took our afternoon walk & saw some bloom in evidence, including yellow creosote bush flowers. Telescope Peak in the Panamints made for a pretty sunset scene to the east.

Tune in to our next adventure to learn how the Panamint Grade saga concludes.

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