Dry Camping in Death Valley - December 2023
At 9 AM on December 6, 2023, I trundled down to the Furnace Creek Campground
entrance kiosk and asked if anyone with a full hookup RV site had
vacated their spot. As of that time, I had no luck there. After a cold
night without heat in my coach, there was no way I was going to spend
second night living like a cave dweller in a dry camping site. In
December there are too few hours of sunlight to fully charge my house
batteries. With laggardly solar battery power it seemed that my only
option was to "pick up stakes" and head back one day early for Panamint
Springs.
If
given the option to have power or sewer, I will select electrical
power every time. I can always cut back on sewer usage, but the lack of
electrical power at the Furnace Creek dry campsites was for me is a
bridge too far. Yes, there are RVs that have 1,000 watts or more of
solar panels and 200+ amp-hours of lithium-ion batteries onboard, but
mine is not yet one of them. As of that mid morning moment, my rig had
about ten amp-hours of battery power remaining. That was not nearly
enough to see me through another cold desert night.
Rather than booking out for Panamint Springs, I decided to take a drive
and see the sights. Before leaving the campground, I swung my truck
back around and asked the ranger at the kiosk if anyone had vacated a
full hookup since 9 AM. Yes, indeed, someone had abandoned their prime
RV site and left it vacant for me. After paying for my new site, I
headed off to Zabriskie Point to climb 
the
hill and see the sights in Death Valley. Best seen at sunset,
Zabriskie Point is spectacular at any time of day. The slowly melting
mud stone hills look like something out of a Salvador Dali painting.
They are colorful and surrealistic to say the least.
While returning from Zabriskie Point to Furnace Creek, I hung a left on Badwater Road.
It is seventeen miles to Badwater, itself. At 282 feet below mean sea
level, that place is touted as the lowest elevation location in North
America. Normally, it is a white salt flat that stretches across the
breadth of lower Death Valley. Once in 2005 and now again since August
2023, it has returned to its ancient glory as Lake Manly. With no
discernible wind, the shallow lake water reflects anything on its
horizon. Having visited Badwater once before, I had no desire to cover
my shoes and truck cab with untold amounts of sticky salt material.
Instead, I drove another quarter mile along the highway, which 
stretches toward Shoshone and intersects with Interstate I-15 at Baker, California.
When I stopped along the highway at the lower foot of shallow Lake
Manly, the view north across the full length of the lake was sublime.
The return trip to Furnace Creek has an altitude gain of exactly 282
feet, meaning that at the junction with Highway 190, you are once again
at mean sea level. On that return trip, one can make several side
trips. The first opportunity is at Devil's Golf Course, which is not to
be confused with the Devil's Cornfield,
at the opposite end of Death Valley. Early travelers throughout the
Western United States were obsessed with naming any large, solitary
rock formation "Church Rock" and almost anything hot and dry "Devils Whatever."
Other
than the Devil's Golf Course there are two notable side trips available
on the Badwater Road. The first is a cutoff to the right called
Natural Bridge Road, as the name implies, the road leads to a hiking
trail that in turn leads to Natural Bridge. Some might call it a stone arch, but they would be wrong, Any stone
arch that spans even a dry watercourse is called a natural bridge.
Good luck climbing up and crossing Natural Bridge. It spans a canyon
from wall to wall and is both thirty-five feet thick and thirty-five
feet from the canyon floor to the underside of the arch. Although the
round trip hike is only one mile, there is no water available and very
little shade during the middle of the day. The National Park Service
recommends not making the hike after 10 AM during the hot season.
The second side trip is Artist's Drive, which is a loop road through a
series of hills and gullies that may spring to life with color, but
only on the right day at 
the
right time. Otherwise the hills have a dull green or dull red hue to
them. Good luck to you if you arrive on a day when the Artist's Palette
comes to life. The road itself is one way only, so once you start, you
are committed to looping up, over, around, and through a sinuous
ribbon of asphalt to the very end, which is once again at Badwater
Road. If you have never taken Artist's Drive, I recommend taking it,
just so you can check it off your bucket list. If you take the trip
again on your next visit to Death Valley, count yourself as an optimist.
I say that because the odds are about one thousand to one that you
will see the same dull green and red hills you saw on your last visit.
After returning to my campsite, I closed the
slide-outs on my RV, hooked it up to my truck and traveled two hundred
yards to my “new” full hookup site. No longer feeling like a 49er lost in time, I prepared for one more night at Furnace 
Creek Campground in Death Valley. Only this time, I had electric lights and two space heaters to warm my bones. Unlike the lost emigrants of 1849
Death Valley, there was to be no brush lean-to or cave dwelling for
me. It was almost 174 years to the day that the original lost families
made their way out of Death Valley to civilization, better known as Los Angeles.
The following day, I would travel back over Towne Pass to Panamint Springs Resort, where I would spend two more nights. After that, I would take my own quick trip back to civilization, better known as Los Angeles.
This is Part Three of a Seven Part article. To read Part Four, Click HERE. To return to Part One, click HERE.
