Friday: (04/16) With 70 miles to go, the sun in our faces, and just out side the park, we stopped for the night along side the road a few feet before the Welcome to Death Valley Park sign. Nice spot but not much in the way of flowers here.
Lou fixed a leftover dinner of the pork chop, fried potatoes and broccoli.
Saturday: (04/17) We showered then hit the road without breakfast, just a banana. We thought we'd stop at an interesting pullout and fix breakfast.
We pulled out several places and took walks and decided getting our outdoor activity done early and deferring breakfast was a better idea.
The flowers were still good coming in from the South on Highway 178. It's nice in the morning but it's 88 degrees at noon and the high is expected to be 98. Lou doesn't move well in the high temps, unlike lizards. Lou fixed stir fry vegetables with smoked sausage with raw mushrooms and cheese for our breakfast/lunch at the ruins.
The hill below the Ashford Ruins had lots of flowers.
We pulled in to the Sunset CG for the night. Actually we paid for two nights but later in the afternoon a big motorhome pulled in next to us and ran his generator constantly. We regretted having paid for two nights. The campground is almost empty so we have to wonder why they chose that particular spot. It is a generator campground but running through the entire day is a bit inconsiderate, in addition to parking so close.
Breakfast/lunch was an omelet?
Dinner was a green salad, with three beans salad as the dressing, Swedish meat balls with gravy over baked potatoes.
After dinner we walked over to the Visitor Center to the evening program. Ranger Bob, the park geologist gave a very interesting talk on how Death Valley was formed and the geological history of the park.
Sunday: (04/18) 0530 We were up early to take advantage of the lack of sun. I fixed Don McMuffins for breakfast and Lou pack a lunch. i noticed my milk had gone bad then noticed the refrigerator wasn't all too cool. It normally freezes things in the top of the fridge. It acted up like this last year when Ernie and I were in Las Vegas but got better so hopefully it will this time as well. It was hot then and, even though for Furnace Creek 98 degrees is considered only warm, we call it hot and suspect the refrigerator does as well.
We headed up to Salt Creek and walked the boardwalk and saw a lot of pupfish.
There were also a lot of the nice small flower seen occasionally before but plentiful here. We were the first there and left before a second party arrived.
We then headed over to Stovepipe Wells with the intent to go see the kilns further up. As we passed, we saw the sign for Mosaic Canyon. It's up a gravel road about 2 miles. We haven't walked this before so we went there instead. Lucky we did.
A ranger talk was just starting so we joined them. It was the same ranger that spoke last night, Ranger Bob,the park geologist and an interpretive ranger. He has a knack for explaining complex geological information in a way even I can understand.
He explained how the canyon and it's rocks were formed. The canyon is carved out of dolomite and had many interesting geological features including conglomerate rock, carved rocks, folded rocks and more. The ranger walk went up the canyon a 1/2 mile but I continued up another 1.5 miles to a dry waterfall and the end of the canyon, as far as hiking was concerned.
I saw this chuckwalla on the trail. he was quite nice and posed for the picture.
These flowers wers seen on the trail.
We stopped by the general store at Stovepipe Wells for lunch. They had cheap Snicker ice cream bars so that started lunch followed by the cucumber ham and cheese sandwiches Lou made with chips.
We returned to Furnace Creek and our camp, hooked up and were ready to go in 5 minutes but couldn't get the Motosat antenna to go down so after I manually did it with a 9 volt battery jumping wires to bring it down, we left an hour and a half latter. I guess the D3 controller is bad. Something to look at when I feel technical.
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