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May 27, 2005
A death march across Panamints, Death ValleyPVT REPORTER LEARNS DEATH VALLEY DIDN'T COME BY ITS NAME LIGHTLY; SURVIVES HELL TREK
By PHILLIP GOMEZ
Death Valley National Park is entering its off-season just now, when it's too hot for most sane people to do any serious hiking. The park may seem like the last place you'd consider for a day hike or backpacking trip at any season of the year. After reading this story you may feel confirmed in that view, but if you're prepared for extreme adventures in a land of extremes, rangers have a backcountry permit waiting just for you. Having just returned from a three-day, three-night backpacking trip in the park in early May with a friend from Florida, our first backcountry trip in the park, we were able to hike during the last week of cooler weather before the summer onslaught. Probably something on the order of 98 percent of Death Valley National Park's million-plus visitors stop at the Furnace Creek Visitor Center, where there's a museum, bookstore and slideshow to be seen. It's a media experience. There's a big thermometer outside along the entranceway that tells you how hot it is on any particular day. Depending on the time visitors have available, there's also easy access to a number of auto pull-out sites, as at Zabriskie Point on Highway 190, and short, well-defined hiking trails, such as the one at Natural Bridge, just off Highway 178. But few take the time or are willing to expend the energy and do the planning necessary to make a trip into the park's backcountry where a real Death Valley wilderness experience can only be earned. The park is, after all, 93 percent wilderness. Only 7 percent, therefore, is compromised by civilized amenities and improvements for visitor accommodations. Such an excursion doesn't have to be an extended expedition, but you have to prepare for it like it could or would be an ordeal - a death march from hell. My experience turned out to be just such a nightmare. I exaggerate some; misery is relative, but it wasn't "fun." Given the right turn of events, it could have been disastrous. My knees are still swollen. Yet I can't wait to go back. Somewhere along the line the modern sport of backpacking captured from golf and tennis the title of being the most elitist of popular recreational sports. It's expensive to acquire the gear, to take off the time and travel to remote wilderness places. It takes a lot of time to inform oneself about the outdoors, and to keep informed on the ever-changing equipment scene. Most of all, it's a deliberate existential choice to willingly strap onto your back 25 to 40 pounds of stuff designed to make your stay in the wilds comfortable, knowing all the while that much of the time you're not going to be. Like other things, backpacking is an acquired taste - for misery, and that fact must be faced upfront. The experience is more enjoyable and sustainable when comprised of three things: a sense of hardy adventure in hiking and camping; a consumerist appetite for the latest advances in gear and technologically designed clothing; and finally, a sense of fatalism at best, masochism at worst. Despite fashion trends of recent years and the hype of "fast-packing" and ultralite gear designed to make life on the trail less weighty on your back, misery can still be your friend. It may be your door to the sublime experience. Most backpacking trips in the Rockies, Cascades or Sierra take place on well-watered trials with directional signs and chance meetings with other backpackers along the way. Not so in Death Valley. As stated in a popular little book, "Backpacking Death Valley" by Chuck Gebhardt and Tom Willis, sold at the Furnace Creek Visitor Center, "Away from the main roads and highways, a backpacker in Death Valley is completely on his or her own and the chance of meeting someone on the trail is usually remote." Signs are likewise few and far between. The first known pioneers in Death Valley, Forty-niners hoping for a shortcut to California's gold strikes, were backpackers - or at least they turned into ones after being forced to abandon their wagons in the rough and steep Forty Mile Canyon east of Beatty. The Forty-niners became American history's poster children for suffering and misery along the trail to the West. They had reached the valley floor with their food supply having practically run out and their spirits were low. Water and grass were bad. Bone tired though they felt, they knew they could not remain where they were. They thought the 8,000- to 11,000-foot Panamint Mountains facing them were the Sierra Nevada range, with California just beyond. They had no idea how much further they would yet have to hike. Our backpacking experience - or at least my experience - hiking up Johnson Canyon in the southern part of the park was much in the same spirit as the Forty-niners, insofar as not really knowing where we were going, though not without direction or goal of where we were headed. Our trip began just a few miles north of the route believed taken by the Lewis Manly party of forlorn pioneers who bestowed the name "Death Valley" in their escape from its grip in early 1850. The leader of the wagon train they had broken off from had warned them that their intended shortcut would lead them "into the jaws of hell." By the time they got to Death Valley, the 40 to 50 wagons with some 400 pioneers broken up into several smaller groups had already endured many hardships traveling the width of Nevada, what would later become the barren Nevada Test Site. John Southworth in his brief history of the trek, "Death Valley in 1849: The Luck of the Gold Rush Emigrants," cuts to the core of Death Valley's meaning for American history: The pioneers' grim determination to avoid the time consumption of the longer, established route, was the essential problem. Once committed to their shortcut, Southworth says, "Forward had become the only way the train could travel. It was much too late to turn back." In our own desert trek I had planned our route with water, the first and most basic essential, foremost in mind. Johnson Canyon is known to be the best-watered hike in the park, according to the guidebooks I had researched. Since water weighs 8 pounds per gallon, and a gallon per day is the recommended amount for each hiker, I didn't want to have to carry any more than necessary; I wanted to find it at springs along the way. I figured our hike would be only about 13 miles long, maybe 18 if we couldn't get the last half of the way up Johnson Canyon via the rocky 4-wheel-drive road. We had two and a half days and two nights, according to my partner's schedule. The route would be ideal, combining an interesting hike up a twisting, narrow canyon through the ruins of a historic ranch established by an early settler, one Hungry Bill, a 6-foot-four Shoshone Indian with a gigantic appetite. Either Bill, his father or both, history records, had witnessed the first pioneers struggling to cross Death Valley in 1849-50. In his younger years, Bill and his brother Panamint Tom became famous for their horse-stealing raids in the Spanish settlements of Los Angeles. Hungry Bill and his brother later adapted to the ways of civilization, helping build the road across Death Valley's salt pan for hauling borax in heavy 20-mule-team wagons. A man named William Johnson had started the ranch that Bill later took over. Johnson, whose name the canyon we traveled now bears, had constructed irrigation ditches and terraces, planted fruit orchards and vegetables in the spring-fed canyon. He made regular trips over rugged Panamint Pass to the silver boomtown of Panamint to sell his wares to hungry miners. When Panamint's boom went bust in 1876, Johnson left the Death Valley country for parts unknown. Hungry Bill, and later his brother, homesteaded the ranch until around 1920, when Bill died. Our route went straight through Hungry Bill's ranch, which stretches for about three-quarters of a mile up the jungle-strewn canyon. The perfect part about this trip was that it tied Johnson Canyon by trail with the historic ruins of old Panamint, in its heyday a roaring camp of 1,000 prospectors reputed to be one of the toughest towns in the frontier West. In our hike we would be reliving a part of that history. The only drawback was, to say that a trail connected the two sides of the mountain range isn't exactly correct. "It's more like bushwhacking," the ranger back at the Furnace Creek Visitor Center had told us. But there's bushwhacking and then there's bushwhacking. In some places there was a faint trail, and in others a choice of fainter trails; in still others there was simply no trail, only obstacles. At times the canyon became so choked with willows and grape vines we had to scale 100 feet up the side of the ravine to get clear of the brambles, making our way down another canyon facet to where we could see a connection farther on up the narrow canyon. In the park's main guidebook "Hiking Death Valley: A Guide to its Natural Wonders and Mining Past," by Michel Diconnet, the author declined to sugarcoat the truth: "The oasis is so dense it is almost impenetrable. Unless you like trekking through jungles, you will want to avoid the wash and follow the higher trails along the gorge's rims. ... It can be a pain; you may even forget you are supposed to be having a good time." |
