Bob Palin's Blog

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....

After the rather cold ending of the ride the week before I decided to head out into the desert where it would definitely be warmer. And it was. One of my favourite loops is to go down through Capitol Reef NP and take the Caineville Wash out to Cathedral Valley then climb up Thousand Lake Mountain and go over the top to UT 72 and home. At this time of year the mountain is buried under several feet of snow but I knew there was a dirt road from Cathedral Valley north to I70 and that it didn't get too high so that was my plan. That is in fact exactly what I did, but it didn't go exactly how I expected it to... The wash meets the road just south of Capitol Reef National Park and this time it actually had water in it, that should have been a warning to me. Caineville Wash is desert with sparse vegetation but Thousand Lake Mountain is visible to the west to provide picturesque scenery. Entering Cathedral Valley from the Middle Desert, the large monument in the c...