Still. Silent. Nothing moves.
An F-16 sneaks up on you so low and loud that you literally land from your jump as it screams off into the distance, off to scare other unsuspecting desert travelers before returning to Edward’s or China Lake.
Forty-five seconds later, silence resumes. You can hear the air molecules hitting your eardrum. You start to tune in.
You hear a little scamper in the bush to your left. A small bird has made his way into it while you weren’t looking and is now rummaging around in the foliage for some reason or another. You watch it intently, curiously, but don’t discover any of the significant clues as to the motives its actions that you were hoping to uncover through your observations. The bird pecks a bit, hops around, and takes flight, off to the next shrub. You wonder briefly if he has a home. Does he visit the same bushes every day? Does he make consistent rounds, or wander? Maybe he has a ‘home tree’, like in Avatar. Perhaps he checks out as many bushes as possible per day, sheltering under a different one each night, before continuing the next day to an entirely new set of Jojoba, Juniper, Ironwood, and Creosote exploring. You’ll never know for sure. You wonder: is he afraid of the hawks? Are the ants afraid of the sparrow?
It’s amazing how many ants you see in the middle of nowhere. The entire Mojave must be undercut with one enormous ant colony; a vast network of tiny tunnels connecting the south end of Joshua Tree National Park to the Northern Death Valley territory, all right beneath us, all either just out of our zone of perception or just past what we give a shit about. Hiking near Kelso?...black ants. Changing a flat tire on a dirt road, 45 miles from anything helpful or useful?....black ants. Breakfast on BLM land in the middle of god-damn-nowhere?... completely swarmed by black ants.
We had a cooler full of jelly, salsa, eggs cracked and drained into a big water bottle, some vegetables, cheese, and all of our fridge’s stock of left-overs that we could put into tupperwares and plastic bags. Other less perishable food stores included potatoes, bread, peanut butter, and enough dried ramen packets to keep us alive if we were stranded for a week without help and unable to move. We carried 10 gallons of water in two large jugs at all times; 5 gallons in the car for use, 5 gallons on the roof as back up. We filled them both every time we came across free drinking water in National Parks or Preserves. A 5 gallon gas tank was strapped up in the cargo basket on the roof next to the extra water, along with a few other rare-use supplies.
We had outfitted the Ford Econoline 350 with a bad-ass DIY carpet kit just one week before. We had two 20deg. rated sleeping bags and a big comforter; a new twin bed from Goodwill built into our kit. The windows had curtains and we had a small cabinet with three drawers for storage of, top to bottom: 1) kitchen/food preparation, 2)“useful shit” like headlamps, toilet paper, and matches, and 3) entertainment, aka a bunch of books. We had a couple brick hammers and chisels for rockhounding stashed next to fishing poles, which we had brought for some reason that now seems ridiculous. Under the bed were kept a 1924 7mm Spanish Mauser, for fun, and a 12ga. Dickenson shotgun, for assholes. I wish I could say we didn’t have to even think about using the latter, but I’m not a liar.
Our journey was to take us from the Salton Sea to Death Valley via Joshua Tree, Mojave Trails National Monument, Mojave National Preserve, and any BLM land we happened upon along the way. Success came 10 days, three tires, and a new fuel vent valve later, with over 1100 miles between us and the beginning.
Our journey started near the coast in Orange County; the first stop was planned to be the Salton Sea. There are a few California State Parks campgrounds there, and I was hoping that, being a state employee, I’d be welcomed in to crash for the night without paying.
We took the 78 East, a route neither of us had been on before, heading inland from Oceanside and winding through miles of hills and various Native American Reservations. We saw a few fallen trees at one point, nearby which, serendipitously enough, happened to be a ‘Tribal Police’ law enforcement vehicle. I pulled over, walked up to the car, and asked the officer if it would be ok for us to pick up some wood from a downed tree. I explained that we had just begun a trip that would take us nearly two weeks to complete, and we were looking for firewood.
“I don’t see any problem with that, it’s just gonna sit there and rot if nobody uses it. Go for it.”
Sarah and I made quick work of loading the space under the bed in our van with smaller sticks, before I climbed up on the roof and tied down the larger pieces she was handing me. All loaded up, we waved a farewell to the officer and were on our way.
The mountainous passes were all heavily wooded, and I’ll always remember a town called Julian, which felt like it had been preserved as a functioning display of an older, slower, smaller “old west” community; an almost forgotten way of life.
From these wooded highlands we dropped in elevation, the dirt lightened in color while the foliage thinned. We passed through Ocotillo Wells just after dark, and never saw the Salton Sea that inaugural day. We did however, come across the largest gas station I’ve ever seen, just outside of the city of Mecca… get the jerky.
We rolled into the Salton Sea State Recreation Area late that night; I talked with a very nice kiosk attendant and explained that I was an ocean lifeguard for the state parks up near Malibu. She was happy to meet another parks employee, as we usually all are when we run into each other, and said I could crash in any of the unoccupied sites for the night, free of charge. I thanked her sincerely and piloted our ship towards the back of the campground.
The next day, the first real, full day of the trip, Sarah and I awoke well rested in the twin bed we had bolted into the back of our econoline. We looked at the lake a bit, and decided to drive south toward Mexico to find some bigger beaches. We briefly entertained the thought of just running across the border quickly for some tacos, especially since Sarah had never driven over the line before, but decided against it because of the firearms we had stashed under the bed. The small taco trailer just outside of La Fonda, parked so long that its wheels have disintegrated and it now sits on rotting hubs, would have to wait for us to visit during a proper surf trip in the near future.
After a day spent practicing our 35mm manual focus film skills with a $20 Craigslist Cannon SLR purchased a week before the trip at some places along the Eastern coast of the Salton Sea, we decided that it was time to move along to Joshua Tree National Park. However, when we were getting into the car, we noticed that the front driver tire looked terrible. I know it was something I should’ve checked out long before the trip, but it slipped past me; there was no tread left on the inside wall, and the inner layers of the tire were showing in some spots. We’d have to make a run into Indio and get it replaced.
Though not usually the most entertaining activity, we decided that having to chill at the tire store and wait for the replacement to be installed wouldn’t slow our roll (pun intended). We literally kept rolling, practicing cartwheels and handstands in a surprisingly large grassy area in the parking lot next to the service garage. I’ll never forget the looks people gave us as we, two adults in our mid-to-late 20’s, spun and flipped and had acrobatic contests with each other while we waited to get moving again.
We got the car back an hour or so later (they were busy), and made it to the Southern entrance of Joshua Tree National Park with about three hours of daylight left in the sky. We pulled over just outside the park to walk our dog, Brad, while we could, since dogs still aren’t allowed on hiking trails in national parks. We arrived at Cottonwood Campground about an hour before sunset; it was already getting cold and the sky was beginning to light up in a characteristically profound desert sunset. We set up the primus burner, made some food, and retreated into the van for the night, drawing the psychedelic curtains across the windows and turning on the lights so we could read.
The next morning greeted us with an amazing sunrise and a couple of new neighbors. I’ve forgotten their names, but the three men who occupied the campsite next to us were fantastic characters. They had arrived early that morning and offered me a shot of rum right as soon as I clambered out of the van. I declined, but walked over and hung out with them for an hour or so anyways, getting to know the group of San Diego guys who had fled their girlfriends and wives for the weekend to catch up with each other. They were full of awesome stories, including the time that one of them had been in a high-speed chase with highway patrol, police helicopters and all. It had ended up on the news, and when he called his brother to let him know he was in jail he got a reply of: “Yeah haha, I know. Everybody knows dude, it’s all over the place! Everywhere! Your boss already called the house and told me to tell you you’re fired haha!”
Leaving these guys to catch up with each other more during their day of what I imagine turned into continued communal drinking and reminiscing, Sarah and I headed out on a hike that left from a trailhead in the campground. It was three miles or so and led to an old mine, closed off but well preserved and in the process of being restored. After this, we packed up the van, bid one final farewell to our new friends, and headed out across the park. We ended up doing a few more hikes that day, in an attempt to lay claim to a couple of the ‘I hiked 10 miles’ Joshua Tree NP stickers that they were giving out in celebration of the National Parks’ 100 year anniversary. We ended up staying at Belle Campground that night; a small, beautiful campground that allows uninhibited access to cross country trekking into the surrounding wilderness.
Waking up that morning, we took a hike up near Skull Rock, climbing some larger rock formations and doing some breathing exercises, just for the heck of it. Feeling great, we continued with our walk and got back to the car to find that all of the parking spots surrounding our car, which had been vacant when we arrived, were filled up. We imagined the trail had become considerably more occupied, too, and were happy to have woken up early and gotten the silence all to ourselves.
After successfully collecting our stickers, we left Joshua Tree with the Mojave National Preserve on our minds. After pulling over at a few undisclosed locations along the way to pick some beautiful natural turquoise out of the tailings of old mines, we settled in for a day of cross-country travel. We passed through the Mojave Trails National Monument, beautiful in its own right, and continued along Route 66 until we got to the 40; I now know where Amboy, Ca., is located.
We came into the Mojave National Preserve through the Granite Mountains, and ended up camping at an undeveloped campground past the end of the road leading out to the Kelso Dunes. The Mojave National Preserve is amazing for many reasons, one of which is that fact that they permit roadside camping “…in areas that have been traditionally used for this purpose and that have an existing fire ring...” (NPS Website). Basically, if you see a beautiful, flat, cleared out space you’d like to spend the night at, pull off and enjoy.
A pair of headlights passed by our semi-remote camp around 2am. I was on guard, but they passed, and after staying awake for a little while to make sure they were gone, I fell back to sleep.
In the morning, we got up, made a fire, and started breakfast. Our cast iron pan had a combination of beans and cheese in it, which we would use to fill small corn tortillas and make breakfast tacos. I had just gotten dressed, having stripped down and decided to take a towel-shower with some of our drinking water. We knew that there was a place to re-supply at the Kelso Depot Visitors Center, just 15 or so miles down the road, so expending a gallon or two of fresh water for bathing was not a concern. However, not long after I had donned my garments and just before our meal was ready, we were approached by a young man with a forlorn look on his face. I knew immediately that we would be helping dig someone out of the sand.
My premonition served valid, and after a brief detailing of how he had gotten stuck, we got up off of our fallen log and followed the man to his car. We passed the end of the dirt road, where a sign said ‘4x4 ONLY’. The terrain immediately turned to sand. About 20 yards past the sign, we came upon a Toyota Corolla, buried to the frame. With the front bumper touching the ground and the wheels having long since lost any sort of traction, the situation was hopeless. Still, we tried to dig it out. I brought over a shovel from our vehicle and we even laid out the snow chains we were carrying in every attempt to remedy the guy’s situation ourselves. It was a desperate and ineffective effort. After 20 or so minutes of futile shoveling, I told the dude he was gonna have to wait for us to go and get a ranger that could come back and tow him out.
This really threw a wrench in our plans, so to speak. We hadn’t packed up camp or eaten our rapidly cooling breakfast. We had wanted to take our time, leisurely getting started and climbing on the sand dunes before heading down to Kelso Depot. However, given the stranger’s circumstance and a desire to enact some sort of ‘good-samaritan’ effort in his name, we scratched the sand dunes from our itinerary, but decided we would still enjoy our breakfast in the warming sun. We did so at a slow and enjoyable pace before heading off in search of help. We got down to Kelso Depot, where I spotted a maintenance man with a radio. Figuring the National and State park systems weren’t too different in many respects, I asked the maintenance man if he could get a hold of a ranger or have one dispatched through his radio. He said “Of course I can! What’s going on?” …We told him about the Corolla stuck in the sand past the end of the Kelso Dunes access road. He rolled his eyes, “Yep. Happens all the time. I’ll head over there and have a ranger meet up with us, too. Thanks for coming to tell us.” We shook hands and he walked away, his radio chattering a female voice from some far off dispatch center. We were looking in the windows of the old Kelso Depot train station that now serves as the visitors center when we met Louise.
Louise is a retired Natural Science teacher from San Francisco; a charming older lady. She, Sarah, and I talked for nearly an hour. She was waiting for the visitor’s center to open, and we were in no rush to walk away from an interesting character. She’s a tough cookie, that Louise. She’d been driving around the desert in her fully-outfitted 4WD Tacoma, which she used to get as far back into drivable territory as possible, so she could spend time alone in the sun, enjoying the natural world she had spent so many years teaching children about. Louise had sleeping quarters built in the bed of the truck, with a kick-ass shell on top. We talked about San Francisco, and our home of Ventura, comparing things like coastal weather, local governments, and homeless populations. We each shared stories about where we had been on our respective trips so far and where we were planning to go – Sarah and I told her that Death Valley National Park was on our list, and Louise said she was planning on going there, too. Eventually parting ways, we told her that we might spend some time camping off the West Side Road in DVNP. I had been there 5 or 6 times before, and remembered signage at the start of the various offshoots of the road saying “No Camping First 1 Mile”, meaning of course that you could camp anywhere you like after that. She was thankful for the information, strictly refusing to pay for camping whenever there was an alternative. We all shook hands and waved goodbye. Louis entered the now-open visitors center. Sarah and I replenished our water supply and proceeded towards the ‘Hole-in-the-Wall’ side of the park.
We had been driving for about two hours, stopping to look at this-or-that. We had crossed train tracks and transferred onto a dirt road. We went through an amazingly densely populated joshua tree grove, and climbed up to a plateaued area on the approach to Hole-in-the-Wall. We were 60 miles from Baker and 66 miles from Needles when we blew our back passenger side tire. These were the two closest places to get the tire replaced, and after some deliberation, Sarah scanning the map while Your Humble Narrator was pulling off the flat and putting on a spare which we discovered was in grossly poor condition, we decided on attempting to reach Needles. Though it was a little longer, we only had about 3 and a half miles of dirt road ahead of us in the Needles direction, whereas we would’ve had to go over roughly 10 miles in the dirt to head towards Baker. With the terrible spare barely inflated (another thing I should’ve checked prior to departure, I know), we opted for the smoother ride toward Needles.
We spent the rest of the day disrupting the normally smooth flow of traffic on the 40 East, driving 45 miles per hour in the slow lane with our hazards on. We got to Needles and, of course, it being a Sunday, the tire store was closed. We lucked out though, in coming across a gas station with a large flag reading “Tire Sale”, and decided to give it a shot. I made friends with the guy behind the counter, impressing him with my Spanish language abilities, and he sold us two used tires, one to replace the flat and one to replace that awful spare, for just over a hundred dollars – labor included. Sarah and I headed back towards the National Preserve that afternoon, confident that we could do anything together after keeping level heads and getting through a stressful day with nothing but smiles and laughter. I can tell you first hand that a jovial approach to a taxing situation makes it much easier to get through successfully. Even though it was difficult and nerve-racking, challenges like this – changing a flat on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere and getting yourself to help without assistance – are a huge reason for making trips like this. You learn a lot about fixing problems on your own that you can’t learn at home. When there’s no cell service, no passers-by, no AAA to come help you out, you find a way to get shit done.
That night, we camped roadside again, at an undeveloped campground beneath a bad-ass rock outcropping that had a cattle skull displayed near an enormous fire ring. It felt like it had been there forever, a large flat area with a stacked-stone fire ring as big as a full-sized dinner table, filled to the brim with ashes and charcoal. Thousands of nights of fires must have roared, flickered, and died here. It was basically something you’d see in a movie. There was a large supply of firewood there, some half-burnt, some totally fresh; we used the rest of the wood we had and some of the new stuff we found there to make a roaring blaze, celebrating our day and welcoming our new tire to the trip. We shared a bottle of wine and laughed at the day we’d had; between the Corolla guy, Louise, the flat, and the tire guy in Needles, it had been full of characters and adventure. Tomorrow we would head to Death Valley, but not before stopping at Turquoise Mountain, near Baker, CA.
When we woke up, we loaded the remaining vagabond firewood on top of the car. We filled two used plastic bags with charcoal from our fire ring, as well as two other fire rings in the immediate vicinity, to have later for cooking. Driving further back into the park, we finally got to visit Hole-in-the-Wall, doing the loop hike before traversing the park-land one last time. We got gas in Baker, then headed East toward Halloran Springs and Turquoise Mountain.
We were hopeful as we got off the highway, picturing easy-to-find Turquoise just off the well-beaten path to Las Vegas. We were greeted by a road whose pavement was in such a terrible condition that driving it was worse and more troublesome than any dirt road we had been on so far. We found out later that apparently maintenance had stopped on the road some time in the 1920’s; it had been weathering for nearly 100 years without upkeep. We drove the road all the way to its end, coming up to an unmanned mountain top compound that looked like it was straight out of a 007-Spy movie. We had passed a dozen or so questionable dirt roads along the way, and any one of them could’ve been the path we needed, or could’ve led us into deep inescapably deep sand. Spending the whole day searching each one for turquoise veins was out of the question. We had neither the time nor desire to buy more tires. Abandoning our hunt for precious minerals, we did decide to take advantage of the desolate setting in the valley below the mountaintop, pulling out both the 7mm Mauser and 12ga., and firing off way too many rounds of each at targets we’d set up along the sides of the road. Nearly deaf and with sore shoulders, we bid farewell to that strange place, heading back West.
We had some delicious and enormous lamb salads at the Mad Greek in Baker, before heading North towards Death Valley. We drove through another amazing desert sunset, and noted a plethora of BLM areas we wanted to come back and visit at a different time. Nearing Death Valley, we were attracted by a sign for some hot springs, and followed the signs to the small town, basically a village, of Tecopa, CA. We arrived around 6pm, and thought we might stay the night there, since there was a campground near the hot springs. The reception building was closed, and there was a sign saying to see the camp host for late arrivals. We went to the host’s site, where there was a large, old, red school bus parked near a small structure. A sign read something along the lines of ‘If I’m not in the bus, come out back to the white building and look for me there.’ Both the bus and shack were dark. The campground was relatively full, but nobody was outside, no one cooking or having fires, nobody moving around the grounds, not really any noise at all beside the rare car passing on the nearby road. The whole place seemed much too quiet, so we left the camp host alone and continued in the direction of DVNP. We got to the Texas Springs campground pretty late, around 9 or 10 if I remember correctly. We paid our fee and made dinner, having some wine by a small fire before getting to bed.
The next morning, we decided to explore the alluvial fans along the dirt trails of the West Side Road. We pulled off on Trail Canyon Road and went as far up as we felt was reasonable for our 2wd E350, pulling off at a “campsite”. We made sure we were off the gravel-and-boulder road so that other vehicles could pass if anyone else came by while we were hiking. We walked another three miles up the side of the fan, a steep grade, approaching the mouth of a canyon that was letting out from the Panamint Range. We never got that far, deciding to stop at one of the roadside campgrounds we came across. It was only about 65 degrees in the sun and we had lots of water, so we weren’t worried about exposure risks. There were large rocks to sit on, and someone had left a huge pile firewood consisting of both the fresh and only-partially-burnt varieties in the makeshift fire-ring there. We ate some sandwiches and explored the geology of rocks we found on the washes on the fan, finding cool things like garnets and photographing them. I took a ‘silence walk’, and Sarah took a nap on some smooth ground while our dog Brad layed down next to her and guarded her, not leaving her side the whole time, even though he was unleashed.
Eventually, we decided it was time to go, and packed up our food trash and water canteen. We also decided to take the firewood with us; between the initial “reservation wood” we were allowed to take and the ancient-campground score we came across in the National Preserve the night we blew our tire, we hadn’t paid for firewood the whole trip. This load would last us until we got home. We’d scavenged what was probably equivalent to 100 dollars worth of firewood. The wood filled my backpack and both arms, and Sarah had to carry two large pieces as well. Thankfully we were heading downhill now, and the heavy wooden load wasn’t as cumbersome as it would’ve been had we been heading the other direction. We were about half way back down when we spotted thin but thick cloud of dust rising into the air up near the mouth of the canyon.
I’ve read The Art of War by Sun Tzu many times and remember my lessons about reading rising dust patterns. Clearly, another car had driven up much further than we had, and was descending the alluvial fan back down into the valley. Once the car had come close enough to be seen, I kept an eye on them, noticing at one point that they had stopped about a mile behind us, near the campsite where we had just spent our morning.
It was about two unhurried minutes later when I realized that whoever was driving down the fan in that car must have been the owner of the firewood that Sarah and I were carrying – firewood that was now sticking well out of my backpack in every direction. If they saw our van near the bottom of the hill and came down any futher, they’d see us for sure, and upon getting to us would see we were making off with their combustible reserves. I looked back again and was dismayed to see another dust cloud, a sure sign that the truck was moving again. They were headed in our direction.
“Sarah! Double time!”
I had explained my conclusion to her as we began trotting a little faster down the side of the fan. We had about a quarter of a mile to go, with the truck now probably just over a mile behind us. We moved quickly; not carelessly, but quickly. We got to the van and frantically threw open the slider, the truck now close enough to be distinguished as a white Tacoma. We stashed the wood inside and shut the door. I grabbed the canteen and began to drink, trying to look as nonchalant as possible when the Tacoma pulled up to us.
Well, wouldn’t you know it, it was Louise.
We happily greeted each other and talked for a while. She was happy to have had the tip-off as to the roadside camping permitted along this side of the park. She told us that she had camped high in the hills at an old abandoned mine site, and was planning to explore the northern end of the park today, before getting on her way. I was in disbelief. The odds of us running into the elderly school teacher again, having not planned it in any way, are mind boggling. If she had left earlier that morning, or we had picked a different road offshoot to drive and walk up, or if we had been in the same places but on different days, we would’ve totally missed each other. I was happy to see her, and hoped it won’t be the last time. Sarah and I were relieved, as well, because her story of camping up in the mountains near an old mine site effectively told us that she was not the owner of the firewood. Nobody was chasing us down to re-claim it after all. It was ours to keep.
We treated ourselves to an afternoon without driving that day, getting a site at the luxurious Furnace Creek Campground. We set up an easy-up that I had found on the beach about a month prior, opened a bottle of wine, and played cards until the sun went down. We were heavily anticipating nightfall, as that night was supposed to be the peak of the Gemini meteor shower. The Gemini shower is the most plentiful and engaging annual meteor shower in the northern hemisphere, and Death Valley is world renowned for star gazing, being recognized as an International Dark Sky Park due to its isolation from light pollution. If everything had lined, up we would’ve had the meteor shower of our lives. However, our hopes for this were low, knowing long before we even set out on this trip that tonight, this magical shooting star feast, was to coincide perfectly with the month’s full moon. We stayed up anyways, eventually making a fire and having s’mores, talking and laughing long into the night. We looked up constantly, knowing that somewhere behind the beaming moon, hundreds of shooting stars were burning up in earth’s atmosphere; we did not see a single one.
The final leg of our trip was to be more or less freehand, as we had a number of maps detailing possible rock-collecting sites, and wanted to check them out in no particular order and without any specific time-table.
We left Death Valley in the morning, hoping to cover the distance between where we were and the town of Ridgecrest that day. We stopped a couple of times along the way, and made it to our destination by early afternoon. After we hit a grocery store, we drove out of town in the direction of Johannesburg, which would be our first ‘rock-hounding’ stop in the morning.
Spangler Hills Recreation Area is a BLM Off Highway Vehicle zone where camping is permitted. It lays about eight and a half miles outside of Ridgecrest. We saw the typical brown and white triangle sign that denoted camping, and pulled off. Spangler Hills seemed like a great place, with miles of interconnected, easy-on-the-shocks dirt roads and beautiful desert views. A couple miles into one such road, we noticed we were out of view of the highway and decided to stop near a fire ring we had spotted. We talked for a while, deciding together that this would be the last night of our trip. We were good on water, but only had four logs left. We decided to burn them all after we watched our last amazingly large desert sunset. I brought out the guns again, blasting rocks from roughly 75 feet away with the 7mm Mauser. It was a good night to end the trip on. We got into bed and fell asleep.
Around 1 o’clock in the morning, I got a funny feeling. I was wide awake for some reason. I tried closing my eyes a couple times, but five minutes later, I was still lying there, staring up at the felt ceiling of the van. Then I saw headlights for the first time.
Someone else, in a large and lifted white truck, had joined us. They had their brights on in addition to the blinding LED light-bar that was mounted on top of their cabin. They drove by once, slowly, and kept going. Apparently they were headed deeper into the OHV area, although why they arrived in the middle of the night remained a mystery. Before I could fall back asleep, they were back. They had circled around the back of the hill we were camped near and were approaching us again, from the same direction as a few minutes before. They slowed, then stopped, facing themselves and all their lights directly at us. We were lit up like a cartoon character in a jailbreak attempt. I woke Sarah up and told her what was going on. They remained parked, blasting us with lights, for way too long. They hadn’t just happened upon us, they were fully scoping us out. They were sizing us up and didn’t care if we noticed them.
I had been in a situation exactly like this once before. My brother Christian and I were camping at San Miguel, near Ensenada in Baja California. We had been there for two days and had two more ahead of us, if I remember correctly. We had set up separate tents near the Jeep Grand Cherokee I had driven us down there in. Long after falling asleep that night, I awoke to Christian yelling my name.
“Brendan! Hey, Brendan! Wake up! Someone’s here!”
Indeed someone was. Peeking out the mesh screening of my tent, I saw a large, red, older style Chevy pickup, blasting us with their brights. The motor was loud, almost as if there was no muffler on the vehicle, which was far from unheard of in Mexico. Christian and I, yelling over the roar of the intruders’ vehicle, collectively decided that there was no reason for anyone to be approaching us so late, apparently intentionally waking us up with bright lights and a loud car. The campground man had already come to double check our ticket, and the Federales themselves had even been by that afternoon to not-so-slyly ask us if we were “Marijuana smokers?”…we were being scoped out by some other party.
The truck stayed for about two minutes before leaving. I got out of my tent, gave Christian one of the larger knives out of the arsenal of cutlery I always keep in my tent on Mexican camping trips, and went back to sleep.
I had just started to dream when the roaring of a motor jerked me back awake. Christian was already talking to me when I regained consciousness.
“Brendan! They’re back, dude! What should we do?”
The truck was closer now, probably less than 10 feet from our tents. A malicious plan was being enacted, and we were the victims.
“Just chill, brotha! Let them leave again.” I called to him.
“I’m gonna go talk to them. This is lame!” He hollered back.
“No! Christian, don’t! Just chill and they’ll leave. Getting out of your tent is exactly what they want you to do.They’ll be able to size you up and down in their headlights and you won’t be able to see anything. You’ll be defenseless, just chill!” I explained.
We stayed in our tents, and after what felt like a lifetime, the truck drove off. They never came back that night, or any other night of our trip.
I never thought I’d see that trick again, but here it was, fucking up another night’s sleep, this time in the California desert, on a trip that had been easy-breezy until now. I quickly reminded Sarah of the time Christian and I were in Baja; she knew the tale already. We formulated the plan to throw everything that was still outside in the dirt into the van via the slider as soon as the white stallion with the LED bar took off again. In the meantime, I readied the 12 gauge, on the chance that they engaged us before we could split. We were miles from the nearest road or any help; I wasn’t messing around. I refused to let us get into some sort of Pulp Fiction ‘basement scene’ out here.
The truck started moving. It came closer, circling our little camp one time… much too slowly. It drove off in the same direction it drove off in before, deeper into the wilderness zone. We sprang into action. Everything was packed and the car was running within 45 seconds of their tail-lights disappearing into the night. I put the van in drive and immediately realized that the maze of dirt roads and trails that led us in here the prior afternoon was an inescapable labyrinth in the dark. We were lost out there. I saw the white truck cresting the hill again, coming back down towards us. We were taking the dirt bumps way too fast in our three-ton van. The white truck drove straight to where we were just camped and stopped. An eerie chill passed over us as we realized they had intentionally honed in on our last known location. I hoped that the occupants of the other vehicle would walk around and take notice of the ridiculously large casings from the 7mm Mauser rounds I’d abandoned on the ground there during the shooting exercised I’d enjoyed upon our arrival and decide not to pursue us.
Huge rifle shells or not, for whatever reason, they didn’t chase us, and we somehow made it back to the highway. Without even thinking, we headed back toward Ridgecrest, towards lights and people, with our tails between our legs. We pulled into a Wal-Mart parking lot and spent the rest of the night there. Sarah slept but I stayed awake the entire time reading a book, too shaken to allow another lapse in sentinel duties. We got a cup of coffee at around 5am and started off towards Johannesburg, now only about half an hour’s drive away. We passed by Spangler Hills one last time along the way. A jaw-droppingly beautiful but ominous blood-red sunrise loomed over the place that we had fled from 5 hours ago.
That day, we stopped at three different rock-hounding sites, collecting opal, jasper, and agates galore. We stopped at Tom’s in Rosamond for lunch, scorffing burritos and burgers in a celebratory return to “Real food!”. It felt fantastic to be ‘stuffed’, this had been the only food we hadn’t prepared for ourselves in 11 days, with the exception of the salads at the Mad Greek. It started raining about an hour away from our house while Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s The Lost Christmas Eve roared through the van’s stereo, over the squawk of the windshield-wipers scraping across the glass at full speed.
Sarah and I talked, already reminiscing about the trip, and wondering about the feasibility of just turning around and doing it again, in the opposite direction, beginning right then and there in Valencia. We would head East and North, back into the desert, back towards adventure. We would embrace the unknown that was waiting to be approached, confronted, and familiarized.
However, idyllic as it would’ve been, the check engine light had turned on about 400 miles ago, back in Death Valley, and needed to be addressed. A hot shower sounded good and there might be waves by now (there weren’t). We had 7 rolls of 35mm film to be developed, and bills would be waiting. We decided to continue home. We had learned as much on this trip as we had on the trips we had taken to Bali, Costa Rica, or Spain, and hadn’t even left the southern half of the state of California.
An F-16 sneaks up on you so low and loud that you literally land from your jump as it screams off into the distance, off to scare other unsuspecting desert travelers before returning to Edward’s or China Lake.
Forty-five seconds later, silence resumes. You can hear the air molecules hitting your eardrum. You start to tune in.
You hear a little scamper in the bush to your left. A small bird has made his way into it while you weren’t looking and is now rummaging around in the foliage for some reason or another. You watch it intently, curiously, but don’t discover any of the significant clues as to the motives its actions that you were hoping to uncover through your observations. The bird pecks a bit, hops around, and takes flight, off to the next shrub. You wonder briefly if he has a home. Does he visit the same bushes every day? Does he make consistent rounds, or wander? Maybe he has a ‘home tree’, like in Avatar. Perhaps he checks out as many bushes as possible per day, sheltering under a different one each night, before continuing the next day to an entirely new set of Jojoba, Juniper, Ironwood, and Creosote exploring. You’ll never know for sure. You wonder: is he afraid of the hawks? Are the ants afraid of the sparrow?
It’s amazing how many ants you see in the middle of nowhere. The entire Mojave must be undercut with one enormous ant colony; a vast network of tiny tunnels connecting the south end of Joshua Tree National Park to the Northern Death Valley territory, all right beneath us, all either just out of our zone of perception or just past what we give a shit about. Hiking near Kelso?...black ants. Changing a flat tire on a dirt road, 45 miles from anything helpful or useful?....black ants. Breakfast on BLM land in the middle of god-damn-nowhere?... completely swarmed by black ants.
We had a cooler full of jelly, salsa, eggs cracked and drained into a big water bottle, some vegetables, cheese, and all of our fridge’s stock of left-overs that we could put into tupperwares and plastic bags. Other less perishable food stores included potatoes, bread, peanut butter, and enough dried ramen packets to keep us alive if we were stranded for a week without help and unable to move. We carried 10 gallons of water in two large jugs at all times; 5 gallons in the car for use, 5 gallons on the roof as back up. We filled them both every time we came across free drinking water in National Parks or Preserves. A 5 gallon gas tank was strapped up in the cargo basket on the roof next to the extra water, along with a few other rare-use supplies.
We had outfitted the Ford Econoline 350 with a bad-ass DIY carpet kit just one week before. We had two 20deg. rated sleeping bags and a big comforter; a new twin bed from Goodwill built into our kit. The windows had curtains and we had a small cabinet with three drawers for storage of, top to bottom: 1) kitchen/food preparation, 2)“useful shit” like headlamps, toilet paper, and matches, and 3) entertainment, aka a bunch of books. We had a couple brick hammers and chisels for rockhounding stashed next to fishing poles, which we had brought for some reason that now seems ridiculous. Under the bed were kept a 1924 7mm Spanish Mauser, for fun, and a 12ga. Dickenson shotgun, for assholes. I wish I could say we didn’t have to even think about using the latter, but I’m not a liar.
Our journey was to take us from the Salton Sea to Death Valley via Joshua Tree, Mojave Trails National Monument, Mojave National Preserve, and any BLM land we happened upon along the way. Success came 10 days, three tires, and a new fuel vent valve later, with over 1100 miles between us and the beginning.
Our journey started near the coast in Orange County; the first stop was planned to be the Salton Sea. There are a few California State Parks campgrounds there, and I was hoping that, being a state employee, I’d be welcomed in to crash for the night without paying.
We took the 78 East, a route neither of us had been on before, heading inland from Oceanside and winding through miles of hills and various Native American Reservations. We saw a few fallen trees at one point, nearby which, serendipitously enough, happened to be a ‘Tribal Police’ law enforcement vehicle. I pulled over, walked up to the car, and asked the officer if it would be ok for us to pick up some wood from a downed tree. I explained that we had just begun a trip that would take us nearly two weeks to complete, and we were looking for firewood.
“I don’t see any problem with that, it’s just gonna sit there and rot if nobody uses it. Go for it.”
Sarah and I made quick work of loading the space under the bed in our van with smaller sticks, before I climbed up on the roof and tied down the larger pieces she was handing me. All loaded up, we waved a farewell to the officer and were on our way.
The mountainous passes were all heavily wooded, and I’ll always remember a town called Julian, which felt like it had been preserved as a functioning display of an older, slower, smaller “old west” community; an almost forgotten way of life.
From these wooded highlands we dropped in elevation, the dirt lightened in color while the foliage thinned. We passed through Ocotillo Wells just after dark, and never saw the Salton Sea that inaugural day. We did however, come across the largest gas station I’ve ever seen, just outside of the city of Mecca… get the jerky.
We rolled into the Salton Sea State Recreation Area late that night; I talked with a very nice kiosk attendant and explained that I was an ocean lifeguard for the state parks up near Malibu. She was happy to meet another parks employee, as we usually all are when we run into each other, and said I could crash in any of the unoccupied sites for the night, free of charge. I thanked her sincerely and piloted our ship towards the back of the campground.
The next day, the first real, full day of the trip, Sarah and I awoke well rested in the twin bed we had bolted into the back of our econoline. We looked at the lake a bit, and decided to drive south toward Mexico to find some bigger beaches. We briefly entertained the thought of just running across the border quickly for some tacos, especially since Sarah had never driven over the line before, but decided against it because of the firearms we had stashed under the bed. The small taco trailer just outside of La Fonda, parked so long that its wheels have disintegrated and it now sits on rotting hubs, would have to wait for us to visit during a proper surf trip in the near future.
After a day spent practicing our 35mm manual focus film skills with a $20 Craigslist Cannon SLR purchased a week before the trip at some places along the Eastern coast of the Salton Sea, we decided that it was time to move along to Joshua Tree National Park. However, when we were getting into the car, we noticed that the front driver tire looked terrible. I know it was something I should’ve checked out long before the trip, but it slipped past me; there was no tread left on the inside wall, and the inner layers of the tire were showing in some spots. We’d have to make a run into Indio and get it replaced.
Though not usually the most entertaining activity, we decided that having to chill at the tire store and wait for the replacement to be installed wouldn’t slow our roll (pun intended). We literally kept rolling, practicing cartwheels and handstands in a surprisingly large grassy area in the parking lot next to the service garage. I’ll never forget the looks people gave us as we, two adults in our mid-to-late 20’s, spun and flipped and had acrobatic contests with each other while we waited to get moving again.
We got the car back an hour or so later (they were busy), and made it to the Southern entrance of Joshua Tree National Park with about three hours of daylight left in the sky. We pulled over just outside the park to walk our dog, Brad, while we could, since dogs still aren’t allowed on hiking trails in national parks. We arrived at Cottonwood Campground about an hour before sunset; it was already getting cold and the sky was beginning to light up in a characteristically profound desert sunset. We set up the primus burner, made some food, and retreated into the van for the night, drawing the psychedelic curtains across the windows and turning on the lights so we could read.
The next morning greeted us with an amazing sunrise and a couple of new neighbors. I’ve forgotten their names, but the three men who occupied the campsite next to us were fantastic characters. They had arrived early that morning and offered me a shot of rum right as soon as I clambered out of the van. I declined, but walked over and hung out with them for an hour or so anyways, getting to know the group of San Diego guys who had fled their girlfriends and wives for the weekend to catch up with each other. They were full of awesome stories, including the time that one of them had been in a high-speed chase with highway patrol, police helicopters and all. It had ended up on the news, and when he called his brother to let him know he was in jail he got a reply of: “Yeah haha, I know. Everybody knows dude, it’s all over the place! Everywhere! Your boss already called the house and told me to tell you you’re fired haha!”
Leaving these guys to catch up with each other more during their day of what I imagine turned into continued communal drinking and reminiscing, Sarah and I headed out on a hike that left from a trailhead in the campground. It was three miles or so and led to an old mine, closed off but well preserved and in the process of being restored. After this, we packed up the van, bid one final farewell to our new friends, and headed out across the park. We ended up doing a few more hikes that day, in an attempt to lay claim to a couple of the ‘I hiked 10 miles’ Joshua Tree NP stickers that they were giving out in celebration of the National Parks’ 100 year anniversary. We ended up staying at Belle Campground that night; a small, beautiful campground that allows uninhibited access to cross country trekking into the surrounding wilderness.
Waking up that morning, we took a hike up near Skull Rock, climbing some larger rock formations and doing some breathing exercises, just for the heck of it. Feeling great, we continued with our walk and got back to the car to find that all of the parking spots surrounding our car, which had been vacant when we arrived, were filled up. We imagined the trail had become considerably more occupied, too, and were happy to have woken up early and gotten the silence all to ourselves.
After successfully collecting our stickers, we left Joshua Tree with the Mojave National Preserve on our minds. After pulling over at a few undisclosed locations along the way to pick some beautiful natural turquoise out of the tailings of old mines, we settled in for a day of cross-country travel. We passed through the Mojave Trails National Monument, beautiful in its own right, and continued along Route 66 until we got to the 40; I now know where Amboy, Ca., is located.
We came into the Mojave National Preserve through the Granite Mountains, and ended up camping at an undeveloped campground past the end of the road leading out to the Kelso Dunes. The Mojave National Preserve is amazing for many reasons, one of which is that fact that they permit roadside camping “…in areas that have been traditionally used for this purpose and that have an existing fire ring...” (NPS Website). Basically, if you see a beautiful, flat, cleared out space you’d like to spend the night at, pull off and enjoy.
A pair of headlights passed by our semi-remote camp around 2am. I was on guard, but they passed, and after staying awake for a little while to make sure they were gone, I fell back to sleep.
In the morning, we got up, made a fire, and started breakfast. Our cast iron pan had a combination of beans and cheese in it, which we would use to fill small corn tortillas and make breakfast tacos. I had just gotten dressed, having stripped down and decided to take a towel-shower with some of our drinking water. We knew that there was a place to re-supply at the Kelso Depot Visitors Center, just 15 or so miles down the road, so expending a gallon or two of fresh water for bathing was not a concern. However, not long after I had donned my garments and just before our meal was ready, we were approached by a young man with a forlorn look on his face. I knew immediately that we would be helping dig someone out of the sand.
My premonition served valid, and after a brief detailing of how he had gotten stuck, we got up off of our fallen log and followed the man to his car. We passed the end of the dirt road, where a sign said ‘4x4 ONLY’. The terrain immediately turned to sand. About 20 yards past the sign, we came upon a Toyota Corolla, buried to the frame. With the front bumper touching the ground and the wheels having long since lost any sort of traction, the situation was hopeless. Still, we tried to dig it out. I brought over a shovel from our vehicle and we even laid out the snow chains we were carrying in every attempt to remedy the guy’s situation ourselves. It was a desperate and ineffective effort. After 20 or so minutes of futile shoveling, I told the dude he was gonna have to wait for us to go and get a ranger that could come back and tow him out.
This really threw a wrench in our plans, so to speak. We hadn’t packed up camp or eaten our rapidly cooling breakfast. We had wanted to take our time, leisurely getting started and climbing on the sand dunes before heading down to Kelso Depot. However, given the stranger’s circumstance and a desire to enact some sort of ‘good-samaritan’ effort in his name, we scratched the sand dunes from our itinerary, but decided we would still enjoy our breakfast in the warming sun. We did so at a slow and enjoyable pace before heading off in search of help. We got down to Kelso Depot, where I spotted a maintenance man with a radio. Figuring the National and State park systems weren’t too different in many respects, I asked the maintenance man if he could get a hold of a ranger or have one dispatched through his radio. He said “Of course I can! What’s going on?” …We told him about the Corolla stuck in the sand past the end of the Kelso Dunes access road. He rolled his eyes, “Yep. Happens all the time. I’ll head over there and have a ranger meet up with us, too. Thanks for coming to tell us.” We shook hands and he walked away, his radio chattering a female voice from some far off dispatch center. We were looking in the windows of the old Kelso Depot train station that now serves as the visitors center when we met Louise.
Louise is a retired Natural Science teacher from San Francisco; a charming older lady. She, Sarah, and I talked for nearly an hour. She was waiting for the visitor’s center to open, and we were in no rush to walk away from an interesting character. She’s a tough cookie, that Louise. She’d been driving around the desert in her fully-outfitted 4WD Tacoma, which she used to get as far back into drivable territory as possible, so she could spend time alone in the sun, enjoying the natural world she had spent so many years teaching children about. Louise had sleeping quarters built in the bed of the truck, with a kick-ass shell on top. We talked about San Francisco, and our home of Ventura, comparing things like coastal weather, local governments, and homeless populations. We each shared stories about where we had been on our respective trips so far and where we were planning to go – Sarah and I told her that Death Valley National Park was on our list, and Louise said she was planning on going there, too. Eventually parting ways, we told her that we might spend some time camping off the West Side Road in DVNP. I had been there 5 or 6 times before, and remembered signage at the start of the various offshoots of the road saying “No Camping First 1 Mile”, meaning of course that you could camp anywhere you like after that. She was thankful for the information, strictly refusing to pay for camping whenever there was an alternative. We all shook hands and waved goodbye. Louis entered the now-open visitors center. Sarah and I replenished our water supply and proceeded towards the ‘Hole-in-the-Wall’ side of the park.
We had been driving for about two hours, stopping to look at this-or-that. We had crossed train tracks and transferred onto a dirt road. We went through an amazingly densely populated joshua tree grove, and climbed up to a plateaued area on the approach to Hole-in-the-Wall. We were 60 miles from Baker and 66 miles from Needles when we blew our back passenger side tire. These were the two closest places to get the tire replaced, and after some deliberation, Sarah scanning the map while Your Humble Narrator was pulling off the flat and putting on a spare which we discovered was in grossly poor condition, we decided on attempting to reach Needles. Though it was a little longer, we only had about 3 and a half miles of dirt road ahead of us in the Needles direction, whereas we would’ve had to go over roughly 10 miles in the dirt to head towards Baker. With the terrible spare barely inflated (another thing I should’ve checked prior to departure, I know), we opted for the smoother ride toward Needles.
We spent the rest of the day disrupting the normally smooth flow of traffic on the 40 East, driving 45 miles per hour in the slow lane with our hazards on. We got to Needles and, of course, it being a Sunday, the tire store was closed. We lucked out though, in coming across a gas station with a large flag reading “Tire Sale”, and decided to give it a shot. I made friends with the guy behind the counter, impressing him with my Spanish language abilities, and he sold us two used tires, one to replace the flat and one to replace that awful spare, for just over a hundred dollars – labor included. Sarah and I headed back towards the National Preserve that afternoon, confident that we could do anything together after keeping level heads and getting through a stressful day with nothing but smiles and laughter. I can tell you first hand that a jovial approach to a taxing situation makes it much easier to get through successfully. Even though it was difficult and nerve-racking, challenges like this – changing a flat on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere and getting yourself to help without assistance – are a huge reason for making trips like this. You learn a lot about fixing problems on your own that you can’t learn at home. When there’s no cell service, no passers-by, no AAA to come help you out, you find a way to get shit done.
That night, we camped roadside again, at an undeveloped campground beneath a bad-ass rock outcropping that had a cattle skull displayed near an enormous fire ring. It felt like it had been there forever, a large flat area with a stacked-stone fire ring as big as a full-sized dinner table, filled to the brim with ashes and charcoal. Thousands of nights of fires must have roared, flickered, and died here. It was basically something you’d see in a movie. There was a large supply of firewood there, some half-burnt, some totally fresh; we used the rest of the wood we had and some of the new stuff we found there to make a roaring blaze, celebrating our day and welcoming our new tire to the trip. We shared a bottle of wine and laughed at the day we’d had; between the Corolla guy, Louise, the flat, and the tire guy in Needles, it had been full of characters and adventure. Tomorrow we would head to Death Valley, but not before stopping at Turquoise Mountain, near Baker, CA.
When we woke up, we loaded the remaining vagabond firewood on top of the car. We filled two used plastic bags with charcoal from our fire ring, as well as two other fire rings in the immediate vicinity, to have later for cooking. Driving further back into the park, we finally got to visit Hole-in-the-Wall, doing the loop hike before traversing the park-land one last time. We got gas in Baker, then headed East toward Halloran Springs and Turquoise Mountain.
We were hopeful as we got off the highway, picturing easy-to-find Turquoise just off the well-beaten path to Las Vegas. We were greeted by a road whose pavement was in such a terrible condition that driving it was worse and more troublesome than any dirt road we had been on so far. We found out later that apparently maintenance had stopped on the road some time in the 1920’s; it had been weathering for nearly 100 years without upkeep. We drove the road all the way to its end, coming up to an unmanned mountain top compound that looked like it was straight out of a 007-Spy movie. We had passed a dozen or so questionable dirt roads along the way, and any one of them could’ve been the path we needed, or could’ve led us into deep inescapably deep sand. Spending the whole day searching each one for turquoise veins was out of the question. We had neither the time nor desire to buy more tires. Abandoning our hunt for precious minerals, we did decide to take advantage of the desolate setting in the valley below the mountaintop, pulling out both the 7mm Mauser and 12ga., and firing off way too many rounds of each at targets we’d set up along the sides of the road. Nearly deaf and with sore shoulders, we bid farewell to that strange place, heading back West.
We had some delicious and enormous lamb salads at the Mad Greek in Baker, before heading North towards Death Valley. We drove through another amazing desert sunset, and noted a plethora of BLM areas we wanted to come back and visit at a different time. Nearing Death Valley, we were attracted by a sign for some hot springs, and followed the signs to the small town, basically a village, of Tecopa, CA. We arrived around 6pm, and thought we might stay the night there, since there was a campground near the hot springs. The reception building was closed, and there was a sign saying to see the camp host for late arrivals. We went to the host’s site, where there was a large, old, red school bus parked near a small structure. A sign read something along the lines of ‘If I’m not in the bus, come out back to the white building and look for me there.’ Both the bus and shack were dark. The campground was relatively full, but nobody was outside, no one cooking or having fires, nobody moving around the grounds, not really any noise at all beside the rare car passing on the nearby road. The whole place seemed much too quiet, so we left the camp host alone and continued in the direction of DVNP. We got to the Texas Springs campground pretty late, around 9 or 10 if I remember correctly. We paid our fee and made dinner, having some wine by a small fire before getting to bed.
The next morning, we decided to explore the alluvial fans along the dirt trails of the West Side Road. We pulled off on Trail Canyon Road and went as far up as we felt was reasonable for our 2wd E350, pulling off at a “campsite”. We made sure we were off the gravel-and-boulder road so that other vehicles could pass if anyone else came by while we were hiking. We walked another three miles up the side of the fan, a steep grade, approaching the mouth of a canyon that was letting out from the Panamint Range. We never got that far, deciding to stop at one of the roadside campgrounds we came across. It was only about 65 degrees in the sun and we had lots of water, so we weren’t worried about exposure risks. There were large rocks to sit on, and someone had left a huge pile firewood consisting of both the fresh and only-partially-burnt varieties in the makeshift fire-ring there. We ate some sandwiches and explored the geology of rocks we found on the washes on the fan, finding cool things like garnets and photographing them. I took a ‘silence walk’, and Sarah took a nap on some smooth ground while our dog Brad layed down next to her and guarded her, not leaving her side the whole time, even though he was unleashed.
Eventually, we decided it was time to go, and packed up our food trash and water canteen. We also decided to take the firewood with us; between the initial “reservation wood” we were allowed to take and the ancient-campground score we came across in the National Preserve the night we blew our tire, we hadn’t paid for firewood the whole trip. This load would last us until we got home. We’d scavenged what was probably equivalent to 100 dollars worth of firewood. The wood filled my backpack and both arms, and Sarah had to carry two large pieces as well. Thankfully we were heading downhill now, and the heavy wooden load wasn’t as cumbersome as it would’ve been had we been heading the other direction. We were about half way back down when we spotted thin but thick cloud of dust rising into the air up near the mouth of the canyon.
I’ve read The Art of War by Sun Tzu many times and remember my lessons about reading rising dust patterns. Clearly, another car had driven up much further than we had, and was descending the alluvial fan back down into the valley. Once the car had come close enough to be seen, I kept an eye on them, noticing at one point that they had stopped about a mile behind us, near the campsite where we had just spent our morning.
It was about two unhurried minutes later when I realized that whoever was driving down the fan in that car must have been the owner of the firewood that Sarah and I were carrying – firewood that was now sticking well out of my backpack in every direction. If they saw our van near the bottom of the hill and came down any futher, they’d see us for sure, and upon getting to us would see we were making off with their combustible reserves. I looked back again and was dismayed to see another dust cloud, a sure sign that the truck was moving again. They were headed in our direction.
“Sarah! Double time!”
I had explained my conclusion to her as we began trotting a little faster down the side of the fan. We had about a quarter of a mile to go, with the truck now probably just over a mile behind us. We moved quickly; not carelessly, but quickly. We got to the van and frantically threw open the slider, the truck now close enough to be distinguished as a white Tacoma. We stashed the wood inside and shut the door. I grabbed the canteen and began to drink, trying to look as nonchalant as possible when the Tacoma pulled up to us.
Well, wouldn’t you know it, it was Louise.
We happily greeted each other and talked for a while. She was happy to have had the tip-off as to the roadside camping permitted along this side of the park. She told us that she had camped high in the hills at an old abandoned mine site, and was planning to explore the northern end of the park today, before getting on her way. I was in disbelief. The odds of us running into the elderly school teacher again, having not planned it in any way, are mind boggling. If she had left earlier that morning, or we had picked a different road offshoot to drive and walk up, or if we had been in the same places but on different days, we would’ve totally missed each other. I was happy to see her, and hoped it won’t be the last time. Sarah and I were relieved, as well, because her story of camping up in the mountains near an old mine site effectively told us that she was not the owner of the firewood. Nobody was chasing us down to re-claim it after all. It was ours to keep.
We treated ourselves to an afternoon without driving that day, getting a site at the luxurious Furnace Creek Campground. We set up an easy-up that I had found on the beach about a month prior, opened a bottle of wine, and played cards until the sun went down. We were heavily anticipating nightfall, as that night was supposed to be the peak of the Gemini meteor shower. The Gemini shower is the most plentiful and engaging annual meteor shower in the northern hemisphere, and Death Valley is world renowned for star gazing, being recognized as an International Dark Sky Park due to its isolation from light pollution. If everything had lined, up we would’ve had the meteor shower of our lives. However, our hopes for this were low, knowing long before we even set out on this trip that tonight, this magical shooting star feast, was to coincide perfectly with the month’s full moon. We stayed up anyways, eventually making a fire and having s’mores, talking and laughing long into the night. We looked up constantly, knowing that somewhere behind the beaming moon, hundreds of shooting stars were burning up in earth’s atmosphere; we did not see a single one.
The final leg of our trip was to be more or less freehand, as we had a number of maps detailing possible rock-collecting sites, and wanted to check them out in no particular order and without any specific time-table.
We left Death Valley in the morning, hoping to cover the distance between where we were and the town of Ridgecrest that day. We stopped a couple of times along the way, and made it to our destination by early afternoon. After we hit a grocery store, we drove out of town in the direction of Johannesburg, which would be our first ‘rock-hounding’ stop in the morning.
Spangler Hills Recreation Area is a BLM Off Highway Vehicle zone where camping is permitted. It lays about eight and a half miles outside of Ridgecrest. We saw the typical brown and white triangle sign that denoted camping, and pulled off. Spangler Hills seemed like a great place, with miles of interconnected, easy-on-the-shocks dirt roads and beautiful desert views. A couple miles into one such road, we noticed we were out of view of the highway and decided to stop near a fire ring we had spotted. We talked for a while, deciding together that this would be the last night of our trip. We were good on water, but only had four logs left. We decided to burn them all after we watched our last amazingly large desert sunset. I brought out the guns again, blasting rocks from roughly 75 feet away with the 7mm Mauser. It was a good night to end the trip on. We got into bed and fell asleep.
Around 1 o’clock in the morning, I got a funny feeling. I was wide awake for some reason. I tried closing my eyes a couple times, but five minutes later, I was still lying there, staring up at the felt ceiling of the van. Then I saw headlights for the first time.
Someone else, in a large and lifted white truck, had joined us. They had their brights on in addition to the blinding LED light-bar that was mounted on top of their cabin. They drove by once, slowly, and kept going. Apparently they were headed deeper into the OHV area, although why they arrived in the middle of the night remained a mystery. Before I could fall back asleep, they were back. They had circled around the back of the hill we were camped near and were approaching us again, from the same direction as a few minutes before. They slowed, then stopped, facing themselves and all their lights directly at us. We were lit up like a cartoon character in a jailbreak attempt. I woke Sarah up and told her what was going on. They remained parked, blasting us with lights, for way too long. They hadn’t just happened upon us, they were fully scoping us out. They were sizing us up and didn’t care if we noticed them.
I had been in a situation exactly like this once before. My brother Christian and I were camping at San Miguel, near Ensenada in Baja California. We had been there for two days and had two more ahead of us, if I remember correctly. We had set up separate tents near the Jeep Grand Cherokee I had driven us down there in. Long after falling asleep that night, I awoke to Christian yelling my name.
“Brendan! Hey, Brendan! Wake up! Someone’s here!”
Indeed someone was. Peeking out the mesh screening of my tent, I saw a large, red, older style Chevy pickup, blasting us with their brights. The motor was loud, almost as if there was no muffler on the vehicle, which was far from unheard of in Mexico. Christian and I, yelling over the roar of the intruders’ vehicle, collectively decided that there was no reason for anyone to be approaching us so late, apparently intentionally waking us up with bright lights and a loud car. The campground man had already come to double check our ticket, and the Federales themselves had even been by that afternoon to not-so-slyly ask us if we were “Marijuana smokers?”…we were being scoped out by some other party.
The truck stayed for about two minutes before leaving. I got out of my tent, gave Christian one of the larger knives out of the arsenal of cutlery I always keep in my tent on Mexican camping trips, and went back to sleep.
I had just started to dream when the roaring of a motor jerked me back awake. Christian was already talking to me when I regained consciousness.
“Brendan! They’re back, dude! What should we do?”
The truck was closer now, probably less than 10 feet from our tents. A malicious plan was being enacted, and we were the victims.
“Just chill, brotha! Let them leave again.” I called to him.
“I’m gonna go talk to them. This is lame!” He hollered back.
“No! Christian, don’t! Just chill and they’ll leave. Getting out of your tent is exactly what they want you to do.They’ll be able to size you up and down in their headlights and you won’t be able to see anything. You’ll be defenseless, just chill!” I explained.
We stayed in our tents, and after what felt like a lifetime, the truck drove off. They never came back that night, or any other night of our trip.
I never thought I’d see that trick again, but here it was, fucking up another night’s sleep, this time in the California desert, on a trip that had been easy-breezy until now. I quickly reminded Sarah of the time Christian and I were in Baja; she knew the tale already. We formulated the plan to throw everything that was still outside in the dirt into the van via the slider as soon as the white stallion with the LED bar took off again. In the meantime, I readied the 12 gauge, on the chance that they engaged us before we could split. We were miles from the nearest road or any help; I wasn’t messing around. I refused to let us get into some sort of Pulp Fiction ‘basement scene’ out here.
The truck started moving. It came closer, circling our little camp one time… much too slowly. It drove off in the same direction it drove off in before, deeper into the wilderness zone. We sprang into action. Everything was packed and the car was running within 45 seconds of their tail-lights disappearing into the night. I put the van in drive and immediately realized that the maze of dirt roads and trails that led us in here the prior afternoon was an inescapable labyrinth in the dark. We were lost out there. I saw the white truck cresting the hill again, coming back down towards us. We were taking the dirt bumps way too fast in our three-ton van. The white truck drove straight to where we were just camped and stopped. An eerie chill passed over us as we realized they had intentionally honed in on our last known location. I hoped that the occupants of the other vehicle would walk around and take notice of the ridiculously large casings from the 7mm Mauser rounds I’d abandoned on the ground there during the shooting exercised I’d enjoyed upon our arrival and decide not to pursue us.
Huge rifle shells or not, for whatever reason, they didn’t chase us, and we somehow made it back to the highway. Without even thinking, we headed back toward Ridgecrest, towards lights and people, with our tails between our legs. We pulled into a Wal-Mart parking lot and spent the rest of the night there. Sarah slept but I stayed awake the entire time reading a book, too shaken to allow another lapse in sentinel duties. We got a cup of coffee at around 5am and started off towards Johannesburg, now only about half an hour’s drive away. We passed by Spangler Hills one last time along the way. A jaw-droppingly beautiful but ominous blood-red sunrise loomed over the place that we had fled from 5 hours ago.
That day, we stopped at three different rock-hounding sites, collecting opal, jasper, and agates galore. We stopped at Tom’s in Rosamond for lunch, scorffing burritos and burgers in a celebratory return to “Real food!”. It felt fantastic to be ‘stuffed’, this had been the only food we hadn’t prepared for ourselves in 11 days, with the exception of the salads at the Mad Greek. It started raining about an hour away from our house while Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s The Lost Christmas Eve roared through the van’s stereo, over the squawk of the windshield-wipers scraping across the glass at full speed.
Sarah and I talked, already reminiscing about the trip, and wondering about the feasibility of just turning around and doing it again, in the opposite direction, beginning right then and there in Valencia. We would head East and North, back into the desert, back towards adventure. We would embrace the unknown that was waiting to be approached, confronted, and familiarized.
However, idyllic as it would’ve been, the check engine light had turned on about 400 miles ago, back in Death Valley, and needed to be addressed. A hot shower sounded good and there might be waves by now (there weren’t). We had 7 rolls of 35mm film to be developed, and bills would be waiting. We decided to continue home. We had learned as much on this trip as we had on the trips we had taken to Bali, Costa Rica, or Spain, and hadn’t even left the southern half of the state of California.
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