Death Valley Adventure

I woke up Friday morning ready to do some riding! I ate breakfast at the restaurant, and then headed across the street to the campground and introduced myself to Gary, Dan, Rob, and Nate. They were finishing up what looked to be a pretty good breakfast cooked up by their resident chef, Rob; and getting ready to go for a ride so I asked if I could tag along.

They wanted to minimize the amount of pavement, and maximize the amount of dirt so we got out the DV maps and decided to head north on Saline Valley Rd towards Hunter Mtn. We headed east out of Panamint Springs for about 13 miles of pavement, and then we hit the dirt heading north on Saline Valley Road.

Nate on Saline Valley Road

A little ways before the turn towards Hunter Mountain, there's a spot where you can see a great view of the Panamint Valley looking south. This is where I had my "senior" moment for the day. I was stopped and decided to take a picture while sitting on my bike. I guess I leaned just a bit too far to the right, because before I knew it my GS reached the critical tip-over point and down it went.

We made the turn for Hunter Mountain and kept going. We ran into a few patches of snow, and everyone made it through just fine. Then we came to a large puddle. I was following Rob, and he headed right for the middle of the puddle and made it through the water without any trouble.

The problem was the mud on the other side of the puddle and down he went. Unfortunately, he dinged his foot pretty good but courageously rode on the rest of the day. Later we would find out his foot was broken! He ended up riding a long ways on that broken foot.

His other problem was that the KTM he was riding had a bad battery so he was trying really hard not to stall the bike, and did manage to keep it running when he went down.

After seeing Rob go down taking the middle line of the puddle, I made it a point to take the far left line and made it through without any trouble.

After the puddle, we had an fun and uneventful ride north through Hidden Valley towards Teakettle Junction. I'm not sure exactly where I took these pics, but I'll include 'em here.

After reaching Teakettle Junction, we headed south to the Racetrack. The Racetrack is a (usually) dry lakebed, infamous for it's "moving rocks" - there are very large rocks, that leave trails in the lakebed as they mysteriously move in strange patterns.

From the Racdetrack, it wasn't much farther south and we were at the top of Lippincott Mine Road.

Lippincott Mine Road is a rideable but challenging downhill - especially on the big GS - but everyone made it down just fine. Then we hit Saline Valley Road again, and headed over South Pass.

We took the last several miles of Saline Valley Road back to the pavement at a pretty fast clip. Gary was really hauling ass, because I was going 85-90mph and he was leaving me in the dust. That was a fun stretch!

Back at the junction of Hwy 190 as Gary and I were waiting for the others, a KTM Adventure rider that we had passed pulled up. He mentioned being low on gas, and I offered him some gas from the extra bottles that I had with me but he thought he could make it back to Panamint Springs so off he went. I mention this now because it becomes more important in a lot of ways on Saturday.

Anyways, it was an awesome day of riding, and of course we enjoyed the BS session at the end of the day!

Later that night, I met up with Vern who was going to be sharing my room at the hotel for the next few nights, and we did some planning with Aaron for Saturday's ride.