Started out Spring 2023 with a four-day trip in the small, low clearance (as we found out) but powerful Ford CMAX to Death Valley NP (DV). We took a bit of a secondary route, leaving from Cathedral City and for the most part, two lane roads north. There was a short stint east on I-15 from Barstow to Baker so that we could have lunch at the Mad Greek. A very scenic 283 +/- mile trip past Eagle Mountain and ending up at Zabriskie Point in DV around 2:00 PM.
For those of you who remember the early ’70’s, Zabriskie Point was a fairly unimpressive movie based on plot and acting, with era appropriate angst, free living and free loving (in the dirt at Zabriskie Point as I recall) but with some great music by early Pink Floyd and Grateful Dead. In truth, Zabriskie Point was named in the early 1900’s after a manager of the largest borax mining operations in area. Again, for the older crowd, you may remember a TV show from the later ’50s and early ’60s called Death Valley Days which was a vignette based western sponsored by, you guessed it, US Borax. As I recall, one of the narrators that passed through the show was Ronald Regan.
Zabriskie Point, which is still from 700 to 1000 feet above the valley floor, ended up being a prelude to the next three days of “oh wows!” and “look at that!” scenery and geologic features. The Point is on the east side of the park in the Furnace Creek Formation which provides the badlands topography that you see in some of the pictures below (slow picture day … but the pace picked up to a staggering 250+ photos a day).
Joni reserved a hotel for us about 40 miles from the DV visitor center at the Longstreet Inn, Casino, RV-Park (gas station, petting zoo, pond with ducks and geese and the requisite casino wedding chapel) for half of the price of the cheapest (other than camping) accommodations in the park which range from $200+ to $600+ a night. Our room was huge, clean, comfortable and had a fireplace and an outside patio overlooking the pond. In addition, the meals in the restaurant were tasty and they offered voluminous, low-cost comfort food. The ambiance was eclectic including a bar cat that sat on the bar. Better yet, it was on the Nevada side of the state line, so gas was $1.75/gallon cheaper than in the park which had a monopoly on gasoline on the California side of the border.
