Third Day in Death Valley

Our third and final day in Death Valley was short since we had a long trip back to San Francisco ahead of us.  All of us pitched in to prepare and cook a nice breakfast, and then we packed the Green Tortoise for our departure.  We made our way back towards the Stovepipe Wells Sand Dunes, and at Stovepipe Wells, we took a route south towards the Panamint Mountains into Mosaic Canyon.  One of our guides had told us that this canyon was extraordinary, and that it was his favorite part of the entire Death Valley trip.  Our bus arrived at the unpaved parking area, and we were turned loose for an hour and forty-five minutes to explore the canyon.

I began walking up the canyon with Bettina and Tineka.  What the three of us noticed right away was the smooth, polished marble that lined the canyon walls, obviously the result of years of violent rushing water through the canyon.  It was pleasing to run my hands along the walls as I climbed through the canyon.  On either side of me the walls of the canyon climbed a steep, yet climbable grade to lofty perches above.  I would have enjoyed climbing the walls, but fear of having to scale my way back down them prevented me from doing so, and besides there was a lot of canyon to explore.

Occasionally the narrow wash offered smaller offshoots to explore, but I was feeling more inclined to walk the main wash along with the others in my party.  The canyon eventually broadened out to provide an open, sweeping view of the mountains, whose many gullies fed this wash.  In a driving rainstorm, I can imagine this wash being a wide, shallow, yet violent confluence of silty brown water getting ready to scour the narrow channel that I had just climbed.  Again, there were more choices for exploration, but I stayed on the "main path."

The canyon narrowed again, and the walls and chutes were again lined with the polished marble rock.  Climbing up area required steadiness, patience and a good handhold, since the rock (although dry) was quite slippery.  Large boulders obstructed the path at times, yet narrow passages circumvented these obstacles.  

Finally, my time to climb had come.  The path hit a dead end (a huge rock), and about 25-feet above the canyon continued.  The rock had plenty of handholds and a scaleable pitch.  I began to make the climb up the rock as Tineka and a guy named Jim watched.  My foot slipped once, but I had three other points clinging to the rock.  However, it was enough to make Jim and Tineka to backtrack to safer, alternate path up to the top.  At the top, I sat down on a rock and pulled out my lunch and waited for other members of the party to join me.

After eating my sandwich, I continued further up into the canyon.  I had only another 20-minutes of time remaining before I was going to have turn around again to make the journey back to the bus.  I climbed, twisted and turned up trough the canyon until I came to a serious dead end.  Here, there was a wall of rock at least 30-feet in height, which appeared to be a spillway for the mad rush of water that comes down this wash when it rains.