Bob Palin's Blog

A Very Wet September Day The whole summer of 2013 has been very wet but the last few days have been exceptional, people have measured as much as 6.5" of rain in that time, the average annual rainfall is 7". Water ran down the road and into my drive early in the morning. ©2013, Fremont River Photography I went to the park to get some waterfall pictures but discovered that the road was closed, however I was able to walk down to the place where the Fremont River had jumped its banks and flooded the road. The water was about 8" deep when I was there but the UDOT driver said it had been over 3 feet during the night. © 2013, Fremont River Photography © 2013, Fremont River Photography ©2013, Fremont River Photography

I've been going to Death Valley on Martin Luther King weekend for a number of years now with a couple of BMW motorcycle groups. Staying in the valley itself has become expensive and crowded in recent years so we now stay somewhere relatively nearby, this year it was in Pahrump. The weather in Utah was snowy so I didn't ride down there but took my Tundra instead. Dante's View - it was cold - 24F here in the morning. The view point is 5,475 feet above the lowest point in North America which is at the base of the cliff from where this picture was taken. On the far range of mountains just to the left of the edge of the picture is Telescope Peak at 11,049ft, the drop from the peak to the valley is twice the depth of the Grand Canyon. The white surface is salt beds. Death Valley is of course very very dry, there is little pesky vegetation to get in the way of the geology (though over 1000 species of plant do grow in the park). This is a view from the back side of Zabriskie Point....