Death Valley National Park

There are a few "rules" often given in RV forums about how long to drive, how long to stay somewhere and at what point in the day to stop driving and set up camp. Something about driving no more than 200 miles, stopping every two hours, and setting up camp by 2pm. We wholeheartedly agree with the rules....and hardly ever follow them. Part of this was because we were working around M's schedule. He had a lot of video conference calls, therefore needing really great wifi and a quiet place to take them. We ended up driving into the evening pretty frequently. Also, nobody ever had to pee at the same time, so some days we stopped a lot more than every two hours, really dragging things out. On the day we went to Death Valley, we entered the park from a remote 2 lane road on the southwestern side of the park. I'm not sure why we chose this road. We had long since realized that blindly following google maps was a terrible idea, especially in California and most especially while towing a trailer. We usually checked for clearance or road condition or grade issues on RV Parky and technically this road was fine for all that. It was just really remote, really rough, really steep. However, our reward was that it was also really beautiful.

I thought of Death Valley as just being the low elevation salt flats, but it's weather is so extreme because the valley is surrounded by several mountain chains. Some of them were sandy, some were covered in volcanic rock, some had big boulders, or purple and pink tops. They are stunning. As we were driving further into the park and passing very few people, the sun started to set. Sand was blowing across the loneliest road I had ever been on. I started to really notice the differences between the rocks, and there were so many different kinds, colors, sizes, shapes, formations. In a very road-trippy moment, we ate some jerky sticks, each taking a bite before passing it to the next person. There were some white knuckle moments for M, who was driving. It was so hard to anticipate where the road was going next. Later I discovered that the bumpiness of the road had dislodged our camper door, so there was a lot of Death Valley dust inside!

Eventually we made our way into the park itself and sadly found that the campground we wanted to stop in...despite having rows and rows of open sites....was not open for the season yet. We drove past the sand dunes as the sun set and then in darkness to the next camping area 20 miles down the road. The developed campground with all the hookups was pretty full, but we went down the street a little way to what was basically a parking lot and for $14 had an awesome view of the night sky. Shooting stars and the milky way.

The next day we went to the visitor center to look at the exhibits and so Laurel could do a junior ranger program. Then we drove to the Badwater Basin, which is the lowest point in North America. They have a plaque upon the mountain above that shows sea level, but this concept was way too mind blowing for the kids. They did like the salt flats, although they kept trying to sneak tastes of it. There is a ton to do in this park and it's an easy drive from Las Vegas (not on the road we came from). I would like to go backpacking there sometime and I understand they have great wildflower blooms during certain times of the year. If you like driving through interesting scenery, you could easily spend a week or more driving through this park, although you need something really rugged to get into parts of the park.