Days 4&5: Death Valley; Falls canyon is Awesome (with a capital "A")

      I choose Wildrose campground because it is near  (in Death Valley scale) the trailheads for Telescope peak and wildrose peak. Now, Telescope peak is 14 miles and like 3000 feet of elevation change from the trailhead, which can only be reached by 4wd. This is according to the map, the website, and a hiking buddy who has been there. Without a high cleareance vehicle one has to walk an extra two miles each way from the normal road. I'd hoped to find SUV'd party going up from the campsite and hitch hike so would do at most 16 and miss the opening climb. Alas, there was only one other person in the campsite and his car was punier than mine.
     So resolved to do the lesser 8.4 mile/2000ft hike to 9000ft high wildrose peak. As I'm putting on my boots at the Charcoal kilns parking lot...

, a little Chevy Sonic comes roaring down from the 4wd only road. "???", goes my brain. The map may be wrong but Chris J has been there. If he says he had to ask people to hop out of this Saturn mini-SUV at portions of bumpy road, it's not passable for regular ol' cars. But... then I look again.. that Sonic is a new, domestic, sub-compact,... and it's white. It's a rental. When I was a consultant we had a saying, "Any rental car is an all-road vehicle".
     Wildrose peak is an good look down into Death Valley but the hike itself isn't anything spectacular and the visibility kinda sucked.

 I finished way earlier than anticipated so I struck camp and moved down to the real heat of the valley at Emigrent campground (which is a gravel parking lot with picnic tables besides the rest stop bathroom. Flush toilets! ... with bees :(  )

Then I went to Mosaic Canyon which is accessible to rank and file. It's pretty

 and filled with meat.

A bunch of Lutherans invaded the campground before I went to sleep. TIP: the stove pipe wells general store sells chocolate covered ice cream pops for $0.95!! not dove or B&J's but I'd have paid $0.95 for ice on a stick at that point.

Falls Canyon

6.5 hrs with not another person sighted. Part of that is great. Part of it is worrisome: when I'm scrambling on rock 10 feet above gravel 2.5 miles from the road in a place that will reach 105 degrees later in the day.

Many of the walls can only be appreciated while moving. Looking up while standing still presents a 2d effect of various facets of the walls. When the observer moves , it becomes clear that there are many different levels of heights and depth and texture. The walls range past at different rates. Its a little disorienting.

 Also disorienting: dehydration. Which I did not experience but which I had to be weary because that morning I discovered a leak in the bottom of my reservoir. Not wanting to truncate my plans nor die a withered dessicated husk, I decided to fill the entire 3L of the platypus and shove two 1L water bottles into the bag. My thought being that I can probably drink 2L of the 3 from the resevoir while another 1L leaks through the bottom of the bag onto my shirt tail and butt. Since this is Death Valley I don't have to worry about hypothermia from being wet. So 4L *should* be okay... and it was by about 300ml.
This was a real lizard:

The front part of my brain knows that it would be really bad to be in a canyon like this when it rains, but another part of me really wants to see what is looks like.

This is what I look like when I'm pretending that I'm going to run out of water and perish of thirst:

..and this is what I sound like.

Overnight at the Motel6 in Ridgecrest

Day3: Don't waste your time at Lake Isabella

It's an ugly dead reservoir. Maybe all the pictures I see on water sports sites are about the Kern river itself. Had planned to spend part of an afternoon here renting a kayak and paddling around. Instead I stopped for long enough to confirm the lack of spirit and energy of the location, then I drove through to Ridgecrest and saw "The Avengers".
Camped at Wildrose campground in Death Valley.

 Nice remote site that still has water. Put the rainfly on the tent between sunset and sundown because I thought it might get cold (4000ft elv). What it got was windy. They never taught us proper fly-tautness in the Philadelphia public school system and I've always been lousy at it. Had to get out at 1am to fixed a flapping flap. Then again at 4am to just roll it up and fasten it directly to a tent-poll. Cool part was there enough light from the 3/4 SuperMoon to do that without a headlamp

In a way, it's like coming home

As many of you know, I have only one addiction: TV. In 2007 I tried to ween myself by turning off DirecTV for a month, then limited myself, then I cut it off entirely... But that's when the library DVD collection got large, hulu and other streaming started, government sponsors digital-to-analog converters made my old CRT work again, I accidentally started BitTorrenting things...
Eventually I got back to essentially the same level of consumption as before attempting cessation. (Even caught up on the intervening seasons of LOST.) The only thing that was missing was sports. They are almost entirely on cable and rarely found easily online.

Now, every night I'm not camping there's a playoff basketball game on TNT or a baseball game on ESPN. It's low productivity paradise at the Motel6/Travelodge.

Day 3 - the game you cannot help but play

So usually Carrizzo plains national monument looks like this in the spring.
This year it looks more like this since there was so little rain.

Ranger Adam said that a couple of flowers were just starting to pop this weekend but they were the kind that weren't pretty but did produce a lot of pollen.
Saw this little guy,

which is really different from the skinks and usual trail lizards of the bay
Then I almost stepped on this guy.

Not sure if it was a rattler or not. The head didn't have a diamond shape and the tail was hidden in the grass.
Those of you who've come across good sized potential poisonous slitherers while hiking know that the rest of the day is spent playing the game "stick? Or snake?" It's hours of involuntary distraction.

Day 2 - Overdoing Pinnacles

Ok, I'll just hike for 4 hours or so, go to high peaks

, convince some kids that one of the hawks is a condor,.. maybe if I feel good I'll hump over to the reservoir and stand under the big talus and feel lucky.

OR I can nearly wipe myself out by doing three ascents instead of one or two. There's that peak in the south that NO ONE I know has ever visited....
So I hiked 6.5 hrs on the first day. Saw some familiar sights and some new; but it was a stupid expenditure of energy and finite knee wear. (Two late-50s Midwestern dudes, upon seeing my trekking poles 'quipped' at me ,"hey did you forget your skis?")

Movin  south

Day 1 - which bag has what?

The 1st Motel6 doesn't seem to have any hot water. No matter, I am sated and warmed from within by the softball size avocado I had for dinner.
There are 4 reusable grocery bags in the trunk, a duffel bag, weekend bag, a large day pack, and a small day pack in the back seat. It'll take me a while to figure out what to bring into a hotel room and what to use for camping.
Still too much stuff. Long road to a Jedi knighthood.

Tomorrow is a hike at Pinnacles national monument.  I've been there a few times so it's a familiar start.

The plan so far

Intended route 
through mid-June. I reserve the right to disappoint everyone and stop for weeks in any town that has good bagels. That said, I am open to rotating hiking companions if people want to join/unjoin the trip in progress. So far everything I've reserved (Yurt {Utah}, Cabin {WY}, motel) has an extra bed.