Fun With Chris and Jane

Some 10 miles south of Furnace Creek lies the entrance to Artist Drive, one of the more popular attractions in the park. For nine miles, this one-way road winds its way east, north, then west through the foothills of the Black Mountains, passing through rugged washes and across wide alluvial plains. We didn’t expect to do any hiking along this drive, but the scenery beckons literally every driver to make frequent stops to further investigate the grandness up close –…

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A couple of miles north of Badwater is a dirt road leading up a gentle grade to one of the many canyons that empty into Death Valley, this one containing a feature known as Natural Bridge.  Here, centuries of water runoff through the canyon has hollowed out a passage below more obstinate rock, leaving a span across the canyon not unlike the celebrated arches of Utah or Arizona. The sign at the start of the dirt road indicated that Natural Bridge was…

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Badwater Basin is the lowest point in North America at 282 feet below sea level, so we had to pay the place a visit, if for no other reason than simply “because it’s there.” Like so many features of the desert, the relative distance on the map belie the true dimensions between points – Badwater is 17 miles south of Furnace Creek, and we quickly realized as we made our way down the Badwater Road that our day was going…

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We had been hearing about the wildflower “superbloom” at Death Valley for a couple of weeks, so we decided to drive out for the weekend and see it for ourselves. The closest hotel room/camp site we could find was in Ridgecrest, some two hours southwest of the main park facilities at Furnace Creek, so we figured to have a lot of driving ahead of us (more than 14 hours in the car over the course of the weekend, as it turned…

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Part II of our Indian Canyons adventure led up Andreas Canyon and back, a short mile-long excursion along a perennial creek that was flowing nicely. Similar to Palm Canyon, there was a picnic area at the mouth of the canyon, and we quickly passed through it as we made our way west up the creek. There were more people here than at Palm Canyon, mostly young families whose kids were frolicking in the cool water. We wandered casually upstream beneath…

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Months ago, we had made some reservations at a golf resort in Palm Desert through an email advertisement, thinking we’d enjoy some nice spring weather and a chance to hike in the desert. As the dates approached, however, it looked more like the area was going to be hot, hot, and hot during our three full days there – oh well, we figured we’d just have to get out early to beat the heat, forecasted to be over 100 degrees each…

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Saddleback Butte is a prominent landmark in the desert east of Lancaster, its twin summits and namesake saddle recognizable from viewpoints throughout the Antelope Valley. We had first talked about hiking to the 3,651′ summit last spring when the area’s wildflowers were on full display, but other things took precedence and, before we knew it, summer weather was upon us and desert hiking became genuinely unappealing. With a long weekend at hand and desert forecasts in the 60s, we decided…

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Chelsea, Pedro, and the boys came up to Wrightwood on Friday night, planning to go to Joshua Tree NP the following day to do Chelsea’s pregnancy photo shoot with our favorite photographer, Holly Carlyle (we got to know Holly five years ago when she shot Chelsea and Pedro’s wedding, and she’s been a veritable fixture in our lives ever since). We had yet to make the drive east through the San Bernardino mountains, so we figured we’d spend Saturday afternoon…

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As we’ve recently driven so many times through the desert on our way to Wrightwood, we’ve been making a list of hikes we can do on the way to and from, and prominent among those is the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve west of Lancaster off Hwy 138. We had been following developing wildflower reports on various other web sites, and the announcement late last week that the Poppy Reserve was now in peak bloom prompted us to leave the cabin…

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