Today starts off in the mid morning around 9 o’clock as we packed up our hotel from the New York New York hotel. After cleaning up our clothes and doing the packing we had breakfast downstairs so we can fuel up for Death Valley. We ended up eating a full breakfast at the all American Grill in the hotel. We both had coffee and an omelette. We left Vegas around 10am and headed to Death Valley National Park. We had to leave at a certain time to check out without penalty.
Our first stop of the day was to load up on supplies for the road. Ice, and fresh food for camping was on the list. You would think after all we had been through we would have been tired, and wanting to take a break on the roadtrip, but our resolve was revitalized, and the excitement hit us again knowing we were heading into virgin territory to us on this road trip.
As I mentioned before, there were clothes we had to leave out of our bags due to them being wet. Well upon leaving the store we realized we were in some of the driest parts of the earth, and thus we decided to hang the jeans, shirts, and socks which were damp still out the window and drive through the arid parts of the desert to dry them out! This worked like a charm and our clothes felt dry and fresh, as if they just had laundry done to them! A fun little road trip hack we found.
On the way to the park, we had lunch in a larger town for the area. There is also a larger city we went through called Pahrump. We stopped at Hardees (which was another first for me), before heading west through death Valley Junction.
Now Death Valley National Park is about an hour and a half to two hours from Las Vegas. It is directly west and features a vast wilderness of absolutely nothing. It’s called Death Valley because of the hot temperatures that exist. They can reach the hottest temperatures in the world, and has on record the hottest temperature ever recorded in the US (132F). When we were there it was almost 110°.
Since we stayed in a hotel the last three nights, we needed to get back on the camping game after blowing our budget for the last couple days in Vegas. We had been doing good up to this point to keep $100 a day minimum (average). However in Vegas we ended up spending about $700 in three days. Thank goodness we had the free hotel. The first stop in Death Valley was the Painted Desert called Artists Pallete.
There was a feature called the Singing Hills which we wanted to try but we did not have time nor knew where it was located. Evidently if you slide down the hills they seems to whistle from the sand. There were also the famous ‘walking stones’ that were about a three hour drive into the wilderness over many patches of lava rock. We had checked with the National Park visitor center and learned that in order to get to those spots you need a 4 x 4 vehicle with heavy duty tires due to the hot weather. Evidently the rocks can cut right through rubber very easily. They said it was also a minimum $2500 towing fee to get you back to civilization. So we decided to stick to the main road and go to the Petrified Dunes where the sand almost looked like there was gold in the grit. It was a beautiful sight to see but definitely nothing you can get used to, as the temperatures were incredibly hot and arid. There were a couple other things we wanted to see but unfortunately due to time and the fact we couldn’t get there with our car we had to keep going through the valley itself.
Once we got it out of the valley we ascended about 1500 feet of elevation change which ended up putting us into the Sierra Nevada’s mountain range. This was such a drastic change in scenery within about 30 minutes of each other. Even more incredible is that only an hour away from point to point there was an 80° temperature change over the course of a day. It was 120 when we were in Death Valley and 40° at night when we camped in the mountains!
We ended up staying near June Lake which is about 15 miles north of the Devils Post Pile National Monument. Unfortunately we found out that was closed and we were unable to see this attraction on the trip.
June lake has about five campsites around it and they’re always very busy but fortunately we were able to grab a campsite for $27. It felt good to be back out again in the wilderness after spending three days in Las Vegas. We ended the day cooking steak, asparagus and pasta and it ended up being a great meal for the end of the day. The scenery while cooking was sublime, as we had a waterfall doing of a mountain in our rear, and the sun setting over the lake itself.
Our next stop the following day was Yosemite National Park so we to get to bed right at dusk and planned on getting up early to get there. This was the first time we had used the tent since we found out it was broken before. Though the tent had no irreparable damage, the zipper was stuck, thus that morning we left the tent there after packing it up because we had an extra one that Marlon left us. Someone could use it we figured. Anyways, off to bed for rest for the next day!
June 27th expenses-
9.31 Starbucks
17.11 Albertsons
23.57 gas
23 campsite
Total- 72.99