After fueling up in Ridgecrest, it was nearly 2a when I drove through the last
bit of civilization at Trona. I stopped here for a few minutes to take a few
photos of the 
industrial works brightly 
lit up
in the dead of night. It was 3a
by the time I reached Ballarat, three miles of good dirt road off the paved
SR178. Beyond Ballarat I tried to drive further up Pleasant Canyon, but found
conditions unsuitable for low clearance after about half a mile. I managed to
turn the van around (no easy feat), and find a place to park at a junction.
Around this time it occurred to me that I had parked in Ballarat the last time
and started the hike from there.
Having napped for 3-4 hours earlier in the day, I'd planned to start hiking as
soon as I arrived, but some additional sleep was sounding better at the moment.
So off I crawled into the back of the van for another three hours of sleep. It
was delicious.
It was growing light out when I got up at 6a, though sunrise was about an hour
away. There's very little that can be considered pleasant about Pleasant Canyon,
near as I could tell. The first time I had hiked up it completely in the dark,
so I thought this might be a nice chance to see the scenery I had missed.
Initially the 
canyon
is little more than dry gravel and rock with very little
vegetation. After a few miles, one comes to
the portion of the road that that
doubles as a creekbed. The water only seems to flow for about a mile in the
canyon, starting at a spring upstream, and then disappearing a while later after
it runs over the road. The water isn't very deep and one can generally just walk
up the road without getting too wet.
The rusting shell of 
a truck
is found alongside the road, perhaps 70-80 years old,
but having only served for target practice in the last three or four decades.
Another mile in is an 
old grader from the 50s or 60s. It's been many
years since the last time it was used to grade the road.
A couple of 
ferral mules
were annoyed by my approach, braying loudly to protest,but moving off ahead nevertheless. After repeating this manuever a few times
they wised up and moved off the road, watching me suspiciously as I went by, as
though afraid I might try to round them up or otherwise cause mischief.
It was about 8:15a when I arrived at 
Clair Camp,
an 
old mining camp that hasn't
yet been fully abandoned. There is a trailer and large truck parked just off
the road that look to still be utilized. At least one of the
old cabins has had periods of restoration on 
the inside.
The results are useable, but hardly very inviting. There are only a few chairs
and a futon besides 
a lot of junk strewn
about. An air conditioner installed in one wall doesn't appear to have ever been
put in service, though other appliances may have been better utilized with a
connection to an outside propane tank, at one time.
It was just after 9a when I reached
the boundary of Death Valley NP at 
a junction. Here I turned
left to follow 
the side road out of the main canyon as it made its way
to 
a saddle between Peak 8,240ft and 
Porter Peak. The road
continues over the other side of the ridgeline where it contours around the
north side of the ridge to the Porter Mine located on the NW flanks of Porter
Peak. I left the road at the saddle,
turning west to follow 
the ridge to 
the summit,
taking almost another hour and a half. Junipers and some scraggly pines
dot the ridgeline, a big improvement over the more meager vegetation lower
in the canyon. Of course by now I was at nearly 8,000ft, so it wasn't surprising
to see the desert landscape give way some. It was after 11a when I arrived
at the top, having taken nearly 5hrs in the effort.
Under a summit cairn was found an old, rusted tobacco tin that held a single
piece of paper, a 
lode claim form from the 1950s.
It was used by one Jimmie
Heyer to name the summit "Heyers Peak" in July of 1956. There is no evidence
that this was ever actually recorded anywhere, but I decided the name was as
good as any (and better than Peak 8,240ft) and have used it in my database.
There were two other signatures, one from 1987 and a second from 2011 by Bob
Sumner. Bob was also working on the Death Valley P1K summits, having finished
them only a month earlier in Feb, 2012. I would find Bob's signature on a
handful of other similarly obscure summits during the next few days.
As one might expect the summit had a fine vantage point from which to view
Panamint Valley to 
the west and the Argus Range behind it, Telescope
and Sentinel Peaks to 
the north, and several unnamed ridges
looking south before
the range tapers off to the high desert beyond. I had originally planned to
desecend northwest into Happy Canyon, making for a large loop and giving me a
chance to explore this second canyon I'd yet to visit. But the length of time
it had already taken me to reach the summit served as discouragement and I
decided to drop back down to Pleasant Canyon instead. The route I had taken had
been somewhat circuitous, adding several extra miles so that I could take
advantage of the Porter Mine Road to reach the saddle. The route along the ridge
from the saddle had not been as easy or quick as I'd hoped and it was pretty
clear that a more direct descent would undoubtedly be faster. So I headed west
off the summit, 
descending
to a saddle on that side before turning left and
dropping down a wide ravine to Pleasant Canyon. Among other mining detritus
found in the ravine was an 
old tin bucket, some rusted food tins, and
a 
claim boundary marker
from 1983 (this part of the range became part of Death Valley
NP in 1994). Over the next few days I got the distinct impression that there was
no DV canyon nor ridge no matter how obscure that hadn't been scoured by
prospectors at least once in the last 100 years.
By 12:45p I had returned to
the main road in Pleasant Canyon, about a mile
upstream from Clair Camp. I still had more than an hour and a half to hike back
down the canyon. There was a party of four 
jeeps
I met driving up the road
below Clair Camp. I was hoping they might be going the other direction soon so
I could hitch a ride back to the bottom, but they never did come back down
during the rest of my walk. I was lucky to run into a herd of about a dozen
bighorn sheep,
ewes and lambs that had come down to the canyon to drink in
the wet section of the roadway. They 
scampered up
the hillside to the south of
the road as I came by, watching me warily as I continued out of view before
they would venture back to resume their drinking. More than eight hours
after starting out, now 2:20p, I finally 
returned
to the van. It had been a long enough outing to
call it a day, but there were a few short outings I still wanted to do along
Wildrose Rd before heading down to Furnace Creek.
One of these places was a drive-up to Aguereberry Point, an impressive lookout
at the north end of the Panamints with a fine lookout to the east over Death
Valley. The dirt road off Wildrose Rd is six miles long and mildly washboarded.
I found that going 10-20mph set up highly uncomfortable vibrations that had the
van shaking something terribly. Driving to 30mph lessened the vibrations
considerably, but reduced steering control around corners to where I had to
worry about sliding into the berm. Still, this proved better than driving under
10mph where it would have been safe but excruciatingly slow. I reached
Aguereberry Point
at 3:30p, parked the van and hiked the short distance out to
the viewpoint at the end of an easy trail. One can look 
northeast into
Blackwater Wash and 
southeast
into Tail Canyon, both dropping down thousands of
feet into Death Valley proper. A lower ridgeline blocks views immediately
east
to Furnace Creek, though looked to make for an interesting future outing.
Only a few miles to the southwest from Aguereberry Point is unnamed Peak
7,204ft with more than 1,000ft of prominence, and it was to this I next turn my
attention. I drove back down the road about a mile to a junction with a
little-used side road heading south. The road seemed decent enough for low
clearance, so I drove this as far as I could (about a quarter mile) to where
a gate
stops further progress to all vehicles. I parked here, about a mile and
a half from 
the peak.
The topo map shows the road ending where it reaches a
saddle a short distance further south along the main crest of the range. What
isn't shown is that the long-unused road continues southwest along crest towards
the summit I was interested in. A nice convenience, but not all that necessary
as the cross-country travel is not difficult, as in most of Death Valley. I
followed the crest using a combination of the road (where useful) and
cross-country where the road makes unhelpful switchbacks. In all I spent about
40 minutes to cover the one and a half mile distance to the summit.
Badwater can be seen 7,000ft down Trail Canyon from the summit to the east. The
higher peaks of the Panamints rise to the south, though the highest are blocked
by the intervening Bald and Wildrose Peaks. A register in 
a plastic jar
was found dating back a few years, left by 
John Vitz. There were
a handful of 
other visitors since then,
the most recent once again being Bob Sumner back in November.
I 
returned to 
the start
shortly after 5p, spending the next 30 minutes or so
driving back to Wildrose Rd followed by a short stint on pavement before taking
the dirt road to Skidoo a few miles further north. The Skidoo road is much like
the previous one, moderately washboarded and several miles longer. I had been
on this road once previously for the hike to Tucki Mtn some years ago. Today I
had in mind an unnamed peak, a ridge really, south of the Skidoo township with
800ft of prominence - not enough to get Bob Sumner's notice, but enough for my
own lower standards. There are actually four summits spread out over more than
a mile, each with the same number of contours, making it impossible to determine
from the topo map which is the highest. It seemed I would have to visit at least
a few of them before I could make that determination, if even then.
I parked about six miles in from the pavement at 
a saddle east of the
ridge I dubbed "Skidoo Ridge". I hiked west up 
the hillside to reach
the ridge and then
followed it to the easternmost of the four summits, taking less than 20 minutes.
A cairn
found at the top gave me the initial hope that I'd gotten lucky to find
the highpoint right off. But there was no register and I concluded it was likely
a claim boundary marker. Looking west I could see the westernmost summit a mile
away, the top above the apparent height of the middle two summits. This
suggested that highpoint was one of the two outer summits. I visited the next
two summits in line because they were less than ten minutes' hike. I used my GPS
to measure the relative height of the three summits. The third one came up 15ft
higher than the second and 5ft higher than the 1st. The 4th summit was more
than half a mile away and separated by a drop of some 200ft or so. The day was
drawing to a close and I was loathe to spend the extra half an hour to visit
the fourth summit without knowing if it was higher. I decided to head back, a
bit conflicted. I stopped again at the 2nd summit and eyeballed the tops of
summits #2, #3 and #4 which all appeared to be almost exactly in line. Knowing
that #2 was 15ft lower than #3 and that the distance of #3 to #2 was about 1/4
the distance between #4 and #2, I could estimate that #4 was probaby about 45ft
higher than #3. Rats - this would make it the highpoint. Did I want to come back
yet again at a future date to finish it?
Returning
to the van at 6:30p, about 20 minutes 
before sunset, I decided to
drive further to Skidoo and run up to the #4 summit from the north side.
Utilizing a side road heading all the way to the summit, I managed to get to
the top just as the sun was 
setting over the mountains to the west.
There was a modest-sized 
pile of rocks
at the flattish top, but otherwise no register or
benchmark or anything to distinguish it as something of importance. My standards
were really quite low, I had to admit. The GPS gave a reading of 20ft higher
than any of the other summits, so I was at least happy to have identified (and
reached) the highest. I left to return to the car at a jog, getting back well
before dark.
My plan had been to drive down to Furnace Creek and spend the night there, but I was afraid it might be too warm to sleep comfortably there this evening. It seemed I could more easily stay where I was around 6,000ft and go to bed early, then get up early to do the driving the next morning before sunrise. The entire road to Skidoo is day-use only, but I had spent the night here once before in the van. It seemed highly unlikely that a ranger would bother to patrol this remote site. So I drove back to the original saddle I'd parked at and went about getting my dinner and bed ready. It struck me as soon as I got the stove out that I'd forgotten my mess kit - not the first time I've done that, mind you - and I was minorly distraught that I might have to go to bed without recharging my batteries. I wasn't all that hungry, but I knew I needed food to have the energy to continue doing these long days. So I sat about and considered whether I couldn't get by without the mess kit.
Turns out I could.
My dinner of canned soup would have to be cooked in their own containers. I
realized very quickly that it was necessary to remove the paper wrapper before
putting the can to the stove. The can would just sit
atop the burner and with
a very low flame it could be cooked slowly without bubbling over. A butter knife
helped in stirring the contents and my scrambling gloves were ideal for
holding the can
once it had been heated. It was a bit tricky getting the temperature
right - warm enough to heat the soup, but not too hot as to burn my lips on the
can when drinking it. The whole setup worked so well
that I might very well just skip the mess kit in the future...
Continued...