Ad-hoc Death Valley MTB: "devair" benchmark

TRs for desert ranges.
User avatar
dima
Posts: 1824
Joined: Wed Feb 12, 2014 1:35 am
Location: Los Angeles

Post by dima »

Valentine's day just happened, so I went to Death Valley with my Valentine. Taco and I had some desert plans that fell through, and rain was forecast, so we decided to join the festivities at SwaneyFest on Sat night, and do a few mostly-unplanned MTB day rides.

We arrived at Slabby Acres on Sat afternoon, and rode up into the mountains directly adjacent to camp, to see what's up there. The dirt road climbs up into the mountains, and you get a good look at Pyramid peak

Image

At the flat-ish area up above is a network of dirt roads, and a few scattered metal posts here and there

Image

These are property line markers

Image

Image

We kept riding on the AR444

Image

Nice views all around. It was starting to get dark, and we decided to pick some arbitrary goal. This bump with a funny-looking feature silhouetted up on top would do

Image

At the saddle next to this bump we hit the jackpot: a property line post with the relevant paperwork still attached:

Image

Very recent. And I had no idea there were any active borax operations here still. In any case, today this area is still undeveloped. We summitted to find the summit feature

Image

And the benchmark we didn't know was here

Image

And the view of people coming down from Dante's View

Image

Hung out at the top for a bit, before descending the same way back down to Slabby Acres to socialize. This place is great! The following day we did more stuff.