Death Valley – Day Four

We left Williams at around 6:20 this morning. It was 49 degrees, so we were pretty chilly at first. It did NOT stay that way. Not at all.

We had the road pretty much to ourselves for about the first hour. We stopped at Mother Road Harley-Davidson in Kingman, AZ to see if they might have a boom mic for my headset, but they didn’t, so we just bought t-shirts and a new ball cap for Leon since he had left his other one in Williams. It was around 80 degrees when we left the Harley shop there.

We went along the north side of the Mojave National Preserve, which was pretty, but it was starting to get really hot. We drank as much water as we could hold every time we stopped, but it seemed like we weren’t keeping up. I think Leon was worried about running out of gas because he kept saying, “There was a Chevron,” or “They usually have a sign that says, ‘Last services for however many miles,’ right?” I was wishing I hadn’t told him about all the articles I read that said to fill up every chance you get so you don’t run out and die of dehydration in the desert. And the hotter it got, the more gas stations he noticed.

As we crossed over into California, we were descending into a basin that makes up the Mojave Desert (disclaimer: I’m not a geologist; this is just my guess), and we rounded a bend looking down into a huge open area and saw two structures that looked like gigantic street lights. From where we were, we guessed they were about ten miles away, and they were incredibly bright and shining down onto something that looked like water. We had just passed through the strangest little twilight-zone town called Nipton, an oil town with no real houses, only RV’s and temporary buildings. That had us feeling a little weird already, and then we found ourselves coasting down toward some kind of alien landing pad and we were a little freaked out. It took us about fifteen minutes to get close enough to figure out that they were some kind of solar panel accelerating station, and we calmed down and went about our way.

 

The last town with fuel before you enter the park from the south is Shoshone, CA. I knew this already, but just for fun didn’t tell Leon. As we approached Shoshone, we kind of coasted down a long decline that went for several miles. Leon’s bike has a thermometer, and he would occasionally tell me what the temperature was. But on this long downgrade, he started saying “99 degrees,” then “100 degrees,” about every few miles. The lower we went, the more frequent the reports became, until about even mile, he was saying, “105,” “106,” “107,” etc.

We stopped in Shoshone, filled the tanks and drank some more of our now-100-something-degree water. It was already around 110 degrees. It was so hot that when we would put our ear plugs back in, they burned our ears. We couldn’t touch any metal part of the bikes at all. I started worrying about how the heat would affect the bikes, and I knew we had quite a ways to go before we got to our lodge.

Now is when I want to try to describe what the heat feels like when you’re on a motorcycle, but I just don’t know how. It’s a little like when you’re making lasagna or something, and you open the oven door after the oven’s been on for a long time and that blast of heat hits your face. We really could have used a CamelBak, but for just one day’s use, it wasn’t worth dragging along on this trip. But we got pretty dehydrated. By the time we got to our lodge and unloaded the bikes and sat down in our room, we were spent. I have felt higher temperatures in, say, an actual sauna, and I have felt outside temperatures around 107 or 108 during exceptional heat waves in Texas and Oklahoma, but 115 degrees just floored me. Even Leon, who likes the heat and doesn’t mind being hot, thought it was ridiculous. With the wind blowing, it truly felt like the entire place was an evil, rogue blow dryer come to life, set on the highest heat setting, trying to kill us.

We decided to go to the pool, which was really nice, and we met a couple from Italy. They were about our age, maybe a little older, and they were on their second trip to the United States. The first time, they came to visit their daughter, who was doing a research project in the Texas Tech’s microbiology department, and they had been to the Redwood Forest and Kind’s Canyon and Sequoia National Parks. This time, they just wanted to see a few things they missed the first time. They both talked about how in all of the rest of Europe, work is relaxed and people get plenty of time off for holiday, but in Italy, there are no labor laws and the job market is really bad, so work is very stressful. Companies constantly demand more of people’s time with no overtime pay, and you can’t complain or they’ll replace you, since there are so many people out of work. It made me feel very grateful to have such a fantastic job and to be able to take time off to make this trip. It also made me wonder what the hell I was thinking, spending any part of that time in this god-forsaken hellhole of an uninhabitable place like Death Valley.

When we got out of the pool and walked back to our room, the wind was still blowing and we were now soaking wet, and as much as we could not believe it, we were freezing all the way back to our building. We had to laugh at ourselves, shivering and hurrying to get to a towel when it was 115 freaking degrees outside.

Just before sunset, we decided to ride up to one of the lookouts and actually have a look at the place before we left the next morning. We rode the five miles to Zabriskie Point and took a few pictures. It was actually very pretty. It’s an interesting landscape, and I see why George Lucas filmed the Tattoine scenes there.

 

When we left at 7:30 the next morning, it was already 95 degrees. I’m glad we went there because I’ve always wanted to go, but unless it’s in January, I probably won’t go back. We stopped for another picture on the way out, but not for long, as we were ready to get the hell outta there.

This really was a great place to see, and I’m glad we stopped here. And now, hopefully, back to the realm of the living.

Live hard and ride easy, friends.