The road leading to Titus Canyon. Typical "washboard" graded road for the first few miles...
Titus Canyon Road is a 26mi long, one-way, jeep trail. The road begins in
Nevada, a few miles out side Death Valley National Park. The NPS recommends high
clearance vehicles, optionally with 4wd. Unless you are used to driving on these
kind of roads (which I'm not), I would recommend 4wd!
The road leading to Titus Canyon. Typical
"washboard" graded road for the first few miles...
Now we are getting closer to the mountain
pass...
Just after (and below) the pass. The lookout
at the highest point was pretty packed. And there is no parking area
at the top. So people were parking to the "side" of a winding one lane
jeep trail with a wall on one side and a steep drop on the other. I squeezed
through and stopped further down for this picture.
Winding further down the mountain...
Now we are starting into the canyon.
An open area in the canyon.
One of the narrow spots through the car
windshield.
Ubehebe Crater (pronounced oo-beh-hee-bee) is a ~3000yr old volcanic crater.
It is the result of an underground steam explosion caused by hot magma rising to
reach the water table. The crater itself is 770ft deep, and ~0.5mi across! Given
that the explosion occurred ~3000 yrs ago, there would have been Native
Americans in the region. Imagine the sounds they must have heard!
Note the barrenness of this area, and the one
piece of sagebrush surviving along the rim. This was the only plant that I could
see along this side of the crater.
Another shot of the crater. This time you can
see the bottom. Note the patch of sagebrush at the bottom.
The Racetrack is a dry lake bed in north-western Death Valley. The
interesting part of this area is that the rocks on the valley floor seem to move
by themselves. I had hoped to drive all of the way out to the Racetrack, but it
is ~54mi round-trip from Ubehebe Crater. After 26mi in Titus Canyon, the late
hour at which I was getting started (only had ~5hrs of sunlight left), and less
reserve fuel than I liked, I decided not to go the whole way out &
back.
On the road out to the "Racetrack", about 10mi
from Ubehebe Crater. This was a large field of Joshua trees. Although they don't
look it in this picture, the trees are 4 ~ 5 feet tall.