Mary and I decided to take advantage of the 4-day weekend for Thanksgiving by driving down to Death Valley National Park. We left on the morning of Thanksgiving. We hit some holiday traffic crossing over highway 152, but it wasn’t too bad. After the obligatory stop at Casa de Fruta to pick up snacks, we made it to Death Valley in about 9 hours. We stayed at the Furnace Creek Ranch and had a nice turkey dinner at the 49er Cafe.

We planned to visit the northern part of the park, which we had not explored on previous trips. We stopped at the Furnace Creek Visitor Center to ask the rangers about the roads and trails we planned to go on. The ranger warned us that the road out to the Racetrack Playa was a sure way to get a flat tire, and the road to Eureka Dunes would shake your car apart. A bit daunted, we headed to the north part of the park anyway to see Scotty’s Castle (picture on the right). At the visitor center there, the ranger was much more encouraging, so we decided to head to the Eureka Dunes.

The road out to the dunes was long (44 miles of dirt road), but in much better condition than we expected (picture on left). It took us about 1.5 hours to drive there, and I would say it was more than worth the trip. The Eureka Dunes are some of the tallest on the continent, rising up to 700 feet. We spent hours walking on the dunes and sitting at the top waiting for the sun to set (see picture on right). There we a few groups camping near the base of the dunes. It must be awesome to wake up to the sun rising over the dunes (not that I would be awake at that time). After the sun set, we went back to the car for our long drive to Furnace Creek. We made it back in time for dinner at the 49er Cafe again.

On Saturday we headed to the East end of the park, near Beatty, NV. Just outside the park we went to an old gold mining ghost town called Rhyolite. The town was founded in 1904 and grew to a population of more than 10,000 people. The mines were played out by 1909 and by 1916, the town shut down. Parts of many of the buildings still remain including a jewelry store, bank and jail house. There is also a restored home built of more than 10,000 old beer bottles.

Our drive back into the park was on another long dirt road, this one passed through Titus Canyon. The first third of the drive is a little dull, crossing a flat expanse of barren desert. The the road starts to climb the Grapevine Mountains and crossing over Red Pass at about the half way point. Shortly after Red Pass we went through another ghost town called Leadfield. There’s not much of this town left. It wasn’t around long as the basis for the claim turned out to be a hoax. The next third of the road is through Titus Canyon. It’s nice driving trough the canyon with the walls towering up each side. At the mouth of the canyon, we hiked to a neighboring canyon called Fall Canyon. This area of the park is supposed to be home to some desert bighorn sheep, but we didn’t see any.

After Titus and Fall canyons, we made our way to Ubehebe Crater (picture above). This vast crater was created when lava came near an underground spring, and the resulting steam blew a hole in the earth. The crater is surrounded by ash and cinder, and there are other, smaller, craters in the area, including Little Hebe. The sun set as we hiked around the crater rim, so we headed back to Furnace Creek and had dinner at the Wrangler Steakhouse.

On our final day we stopped at a site near the western edge of the park near Panamint Springs, called Darwin Falls. We drove about 2.5 miles on a dirt road to the trail head. The hike went through a typical desert canyon, except this one had a small creek running through the middle. After about half a mile, the trail entered lush green tress and shrubs. After another half mile or so we reached the first falls. The climb past these falls is a bit steep, so we decided not to venture any further. Besides, at the time we didn’t know the larger falls are further up. Oh well, maybe next time.

The ride home was pretty uneventful, though we did hit a fair bit of traffic. At one point we back tracked about 25 miles to cut across a smaller road to avoid a bunch of traffic heading to L. A. I’m not sure we saved any time, but we did save our sanity. We did see a nice sunset over the desert. This picture is on a small side road just south of Red Rock Canyon State Park. We had dinner at a Red Robin in some small town off of I-5. We made it home shortly after midnight.

More pictures from this trip can be found in my gallery.

Ok, it’s been a while since I’ve posted. I guess I have a couple weeks to catch up on. I thought I would start with a picture of the squirrel that lives near my house. He was sitting on the window sill one morning screaming at a cat in the yard below. It was pretty funny.

The main item on the agenda two weeks ago was Mary’s birthday. On that day I got her some assorted flowers and made her dinner. The dinner was mainly Thai food: green curry chicken, spicy eggplant with pork, sauteed spinach and brown rice. It was my first attempt at Thai, but it turned out ok.

On the Saturday after Mary’s birthday we went on a hike to Mount Tamalpais with Keith, Dana and Catherine. Mt. Tam is in Marin county, not too far north of the Golden Gate Bridge. On a clear day you will see excellent views of the North Bay. To the left you see Mary on the Fern Creek trail. Unfortunately, it was a cloudy day and the peak was immersed in fog. To the right you see Keith, Mary, Dana and Katherine at the watch tower at the peak. It was pretty chilly there, but we did not get any of the rain we were expecting. We did have some nice views from below the fog line. To the left to can see the North Bay Area. That’s Mill Valley in the foreground, Sausalito and Tiburon in the middle, and San Francisco in the distance. The small island a little left and forward from San Francisco is Alcatraz.

On Wednesday this past week, I hiked up Mission Peak. I’m hoping to make this a weekly (or more) occurrence as I was doing a year or two ago. It’s a nearly 3 mile hike up with about 2100′ of elevation gain. It’s good exercise and a pretty scenic hike. I added a map of the trail on Gmaps Pedometer which I have mentioned before. It gives you an elevation profile and even estimates calories burned! The picture was taken near the beginning of the trail. The peak is in the distance at the top in the middle. By the way, as with any images in my blog, click on them for a larger version.

Earlier today we went for a hike at the Windy Hill Open Space Preserve. It’s another nice Bay Area hike, although this one is on the Peninsula. Mary and I were joined by Joe and his daughter, Lizzie (that’s Lizzie in the picture to the left). It was pretty foggy in the South Bay today, but it was beautiful on Windy Hill. We saw some northern harriers and white-tailed kites flying around today. You can see a couple pictures of the harrier on my gallery page. I made another route map on Gmaps Pedometer.

Work wise I’m still working on the Review Summaries site with Ron, although I haven’t put a lot of time in to it recently. I have some ideas about some Linux projects I want to work on, but in the mean time I plan to play around with a few different versions of Linus to see which one I like. At the moment I’ve been using Ubuntu (based on Debian) which is pretty nice, but I want to check out other flavors such as Slackware, Gentoo, Fedora, OpenSUSE and Mandrake. I’ll keep you posted if anything develops out of this…

Well, I guess I haven’t been doing much that has been blog-worthy of late. Mostly I’ve been going to the gym, working on the review site (see previous post), any trying to figure out what to do with my life, although I don’t think I’ve made much progress on that last item.

I did add a few photos from one of my old websites to my gallery. The ones I have added are all in the National Parks section, but I have more to go. They are mostly from 2001 and earlier and are much lower resolution than my more recent photos because they were intended for 56k modems. I don’t have the energy to go back and find all the original photos and rescan them. Thank goodness for digital cameras! I have added pictures from Crater Lake, Grand Teton, Lassen Volcanic, Redwood, Sequoia, Yellowstone and Yosemite.

I met my old roommate, Dhiraj, for lunch last week. It was great catching up with him. I think it’s been a few years since we last met. It turns out he’s working for a company called TheFind, which focuses on product search. It may be that Ron and can collaborate with his company some how, but probably not until we progress a little further with our site.

It’s election day tomorrow. I guess I should vote, which means I should be reading up on all the propositions and elections we have on the ballot. Man, there are so many things on the ballot. It’s so hard make an informed decision on all these things…