A hike I want to do is 14 miles and 4,000 ft of climbing. Today I hiked 9.5 miles at Del Valle Lake and climbed 1600 ft. It went fine, but I can tell I need more conditioning. It was a very nice day. I hiked in just a t-shirt. Here’s my track log and elevation profile.

We’ve had very little rain, which means the Sierras have received very little snow. No snow means (besides the ski-resorts hurting) all the roads over the Sierra passes are still open. In particular, Tioga Road through Yosemite is still open and it usually closes for the season around Thanksgiving. In fact, according to this document with records starting in 1933, this is the latest the road has been open.

We took advantage of the open road as we drove over to Lone Pine and back. I didn’t see any snow or ice on the road, but it certainly has been cold—the creeks and lakes are frozen. Tenaya Lake was very interesting. It was completely frozen over and people were walking, skating, and playing all over it. Note the lack of snow on the shore and on the ice. That seems so incongruous.

On our way back over Tioga Pass we stopped at Lembert Dome and hiked up to Dog Lake. There were a few icy patches on the trail that were getting slick on our descent, but we avoided taking a spill. I kept thinking how this shouldn’t be possible at this time of year. We shouldn’t be able to drive to the trailhead, and we certainly shouldn’t be hiking at 9,000 ft elevation without snowshoes. I hope it breaks loose and snows a lot soon.

Just west of Lone Pine, the Alabama Hills are a picturesque range of boulders of all sizes. In fact, it is so picturesque it has been used for location shots in hundreds of movies, mostly westerns. A pamphlet available at the visitor center describes a driving tour that stops at several of the film locations. We did that interesting tour a couple of years ago, and even watched a couple of the highlighted movies on Netflix.

This trip we were interested in arches, and Alabama Hills has a lot of them. The one shown here is the most popular and even has a marked trail leading out to it. I had done some internet research and found the GPS coordinates of a number of other arches, so we set out to find and photograph them.

Interestingly, a couple of years ago we searched for the Eye of Alabama with just descriptive information—no GPS coordinates—and failed. We hiked all over the general area and never saw it. This time I spotted it easily from the road. Go figure! Check out the slide show for photos of more arches.

I should also mention that we skipped the motel continental breakfast and headed to the Alabama Hills Café. I forget which omelette we had, but it was so good! And large enough (4 eggs) for both of us.

I have never been to Death Valley (except for a very brief visit to Eureka Dunes), so a visit has been high on my to-do list. Karen, however, has not been enthusiastic and whenever I brought the subject up she usually talked about alternatives like Mammoth, Bend, Grand Tetons, Smokey Mountains, or White Mountains (the New Hampshire ones). It’s hard to argue, because I love those places too, but I just insisted we go right after Christmas and sort of guaranteed her a good time.

We left on the 27th (Tuesday) and drove to Lone Pine by going through Yosemite over Tioga Pass. That was a strange experience because usually the pass is closed for the season around Thanksgiving. There just hasn’t been enough snow to permanently close the road. It was cold because Tenaya Lake was frozen and people were playing all over it.

We arrived in Bishop in the late afternoon and I thought dinner at Amigos would be better than anything in Lone Pine. To kill a little time we browsed Galen Rowell’s Mountain Light Gallery. Beautiful photography—I’m not patient enough to learn the techniques to capture photos like that. Dinner was great but we discovered that the signature dish we really like is only served as a special on Saturday.

Wednesday morning we headed from Lone Pine to Furnace Creek and Golden Canyon. The trail-head was already busy and the parking lot was full, but we just parked across the road. While there were a lot of people close to the trail-head, after a couple of miles they thinned out. We hiked all the way through Golden Canyon and up to Zabriskie Point (lots of people again). After getting a few photos, we headed down Gower Gulch to return to our car. There were few people on this part of the trail.

We looked around a bit at Furnace Creek, toured through the museum, stopped at the Harmony Borax Works for some photos, and then headed back to Lone Pine.

On Thursday, we returned and first hiked to Darwin Falls. The trail starts up a dry wash but soon runs along a trickling stream in a brush-filled canyon. Amazingly, there is a small waterfall that apparently runs year round. We met a returning hiker who told us there was an upper falls, but it looked like more rock-scrambling than we wanted to attempt.

Our next stop was Mosaic Canyon which had some interesting geology. Lots of jumbly rocks with a layer of marble in between. After a mile and a half or so the trail hits a dry-fall and we chose to go no further.

We stopped at Stove Pipe Wells to look around and upon returning to our car noticed Toyotie (my friend David’s Toyota 4×4) nearby, so I looked for him in the café and chatted a bit. Then we drove out to the west side of Titus Canyon but decided we didn’t want to hike in on the road (one-way traffic east-to-west). So, we started back, but detoured a little ways up Wildrose Canyon and stopped for some photos at some old ruins—the Journigan Mill. (Check out this paper by Russ Journigan describing mining, milling, and being shut down by the feds. Fascinating story.) While we were there David and his family drove up as well. I wonder what the odds are of unanticipated encounters in Death Valley.

We had further adventures on this trip, but not in Death Valley so I’ll describe them in another post. I think Karen enjoyed the trip. Avoiding long drives on bumpy dirt roads and finding interesting places to hike were key to this.