A Lot of Rocks, But They're Cool.

I think forgetting to take my Centrum with me this weekend is going to cost me, I feel the beginnings of a sore throat coming on tonight. How irritating. Anyway back to the recap.

We took the back way into Death Valley, which involved getting lost along the way on a bunch of dinky little highways in between dinky little towns, as we made our way through Mojave, and eventually up to Trona and beyond. We weren't smart enough to bring a California map, but we did have a portable GPS receiver with us, so we at least knew when we were going in the right direction. I ended up suggesting a shortcut based on the small mapquest map we did have that ended up being a little more than we bargained for, but who would want to just drive in straight lines across valleys when you can skid around switchbacks in the mountains? We got to the hotel around noonish, and the first thing we did was drive up to the campground where we used to camp on a yearly basis. I instantly recognized a lot of the rocks and "mountains" (i.e. hills from todays perspective) surrounding the camp, and was able to climb up and take a picture on top of a few of them, reliving my youth of 15 years ago. Quite strange thinking I'm old enough I can remember things from 15 years ago now. Seems like just yesterday 10 years prior was the earliest I could remember. I'm gettin old.

We then headed up with the rest of the relatives who had made it out there to a place called Dante's View. This view is officially somewhere in my top 10 greatest views of all time. It's the peak of a 5,000 foot mountain, looking down on the lowest point in the United States, that being Badwater at 282 feet below sea level. So essentially you're looking across a 5k foot dropoff, and across the way is a mountain range that rises quite swiftly to 11,000 feet. The world's deepest valley they call it. Quite breathtaking. This is where we had the ceremony to scatter my aunt's ashes, quite a fitting place. After reminiscing about some of the 27 years straight she and my uncle came to Death Valley together, we headed back down the mountain to a place called something like Gold Canyon. This ended up being one of my favorite parts of the trip, as the sun began to go down as we started on the 3 mile hike from one end of the canyon down to the other. Along the way there were beautiful rock formations, and the colors of the canyon and the hills as they changed through the years created something of a striped rainbow effect. We had a bunch of flashlights with us, although once it became pitch black the moon was still shining brightly down upon us. There were also some really neat caves where they'd drilled for gold that went back a good twenty or thirty yards, quite spooky. We eventually made it down to the bottom where my grandpa had brought around the truck to take back the drivers, but we decided we'd all ride back instead. This meant that about seven of us would be crammed into the bed of the truck, with four of us sitting on the little shelf storage thingy behind the cab. I was luckily enough to be on the edge, and given there was no type of safety restraint, this meant I was basically clinging onto the sides of the truck and the handle for the storage compartment for dear life as we swung around curves on a deserted desert highway in the dark of night. That was my first experience riding open-air in the back of a truck, and I must say it was quite neat. When you look up in the sky in the desert, you see about 100 billion times the number of stars you see when you're on the coast, or in the city. I could have sat there staring up at the sky for days.

Alas I'm bored of talking again. More later. Apparently I have plenty of time, nothing at all of interest been going on since I got back. Just a lot of things to do this week that I don't want to do. Yippee.