Despite the government shutdown and extensive damage all over the park due to flash flooding, Furnace Creek Campground is opening on schedule and we are sold out on opening night (10/15/25). Since Cyndee and I are experienced Furnace Creek Hosts we drew the first three day shift.
It was a bit of a crush with almost all of the 120 campsite campers showing up over just a few hour period in the afternoon and evening. But our shift started at 7:00 am and we we were pretty much on our feet until just after 10:00 pm. Nothing like doing nine miles on your first day.
Even with all the other campgrounds and so many park roads and features being closed due to either the government shutdown or flood damage, the public is showing up in droves. There is a lot of pressure on the few things that are open.
But something totally different, John has an October birthday and they usually go quietly by. But my brother decided to not let my 70th be that way. I was surprised with a family gathering in Las Vegas for the weekend of my birthday. There were ten of us in all. My brother, sister-in-law, niece, my daughter, son-in-law, granddaughter, grandson, my son, and of course, Cyndee. They all came in from Texas, North Carolina and California. Quiet the logistics job between flights, hotel rooms and attractions.
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| Boarding Station for the High Roller |
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| The ten of us at the apex of the High Roller (Vegas' giant Ferris wheel) |
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| View of Las Vegas from 500 feet up. |
The birthday can't be topped but there were interesting things here and there. After camp hosting going on fourteen years I thought I had seen about every configuration of truck and trailer there was. But after seeing the below, I guess not. There was something new under the sun for me this day.
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| A very odd setup but it looks like it could get him deep into the backcountry. |
November started off with some celestial events and familiar faces.
This first shot was a supermoon moonrise over the Funeral Mountains as seen from our campsite, Nov 4, 2025.
This fellow below is a known entity. He has a penchant for hiking boots, when he is not catching chihuahuas. Campers that leave hiking boots outside the tent or RV door usually wake up to one or more missing boots. It seems the nastier the boot the better he likes it. I think he is the alpha of a five-coyote pack.
On November 12, 2025 an aurora was visible all the way down to southern California. Couldn't see it with the naked eye but a 3 second exposure on the camera brought it into view.
November had more than celestial events, there were meteorological ones too. Southern California, Nevada and Arizona are experiencing historic rainfalls. Between August and December, Death Valley experienced 5 flash flood events. Each one more than a typical year's worth of rain. But amongst the storms are some photogenic moments. Clouds are a rare thing in Death Valley. Every day is a robins egg blue sky. No features, just flat. But with all this abnormal weather we are seeing clouds often. Weird but welcome.
You can almost see the pot of gold.
It's a rare day to have color in the sky at sunset. But here is our rig with color over the Panamint Mountains.
While it is not as unique as Jeep-Jeep rig, earth roamers are an impressive site. We've had more in a few weeks than we had all of last year. And something else, almost all of the ones we have seen are sporting European tags, like the one below. I can't imaging how much they spend putting those things on a ship to get here from wherever. But I guess for those that drop upwards of a million bucks on one of these, the shipping isn't that big a deal.
To break the routine we also took on some small maintenance projects. We spent our whole time here this time resetting campsite number signs that had been blown or backed over.
Our time in Death Valley this year is half of what it was last year. We decided not to go through another spring of intense wind and skies darkened by dust. We'll be at the end of our contract January 15. Time is flying but because of the weather and flood damage we're not getting to do/see things we wanted to. We are mostly working our three day shift and doing grocery shopping and housekeeping on our three days off. Rinse, repeat. But when the opportunity presented itself, we took it.
In all our time in Death Valley we had never been to the northwestern most highway entrance. The town, Lone Pine, just outside the park entrance is a two hour drive from Furnace Creek. It is a long, visually stunning and practically private drive. This road was closed when we arrived but as soon as we heard it was open we made plans to go.
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| A traffic jam out here is slowing down for snake crossing the road. |
North Highway, after weeks of being closed, opened. The two big features that this road services are Mesquite Campground and Ubehebe (pronounced You-Be-He-Be) Crater. Fun to say, fun to go see.
The crater is about an hour drive from Furnace Creek, down a long, undulating, narrow stretch of asphalt. Great views of the valley and surrounding mountains.
This story board will tell you that the crater is about a half mile wide and 500 feet deep. It was not formed by a volcanic explosion. Rather, subterranean water came in contact with magma and instantly flashed into steam, creating an explosion that hurled shattered rock for six square miles and in places up to 150 feet deep. All I can say is that once you get there the black, porous rock the size of coarse gravel, under your feet is nothing like you've ever seen.
In addition to being an impressive crater we also got to see it in rare form as it had a pond about eight to ten feet deep in the bottom. The rain just keeps coming.
Sadly, the day after we visited the crater there was another flash flood. It undercut the asphalt of the North Highway and pretty much scoured Mesquite Campground off the map. The camp host for Mesquite got to work a whole three days. No telling when the road will be fixed but it is once again indefinitely closed.
This is part of the weather system that took out the North Highway.
This is what we were left with in Furnace Creek Campground.
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This is looking out the door of our camper after the storm passed.
We had standing water and deep mud but nothing compared to the tent sites. |
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The tent only sites stayed a mess most of the time. Between
standing water and ankle-deep sticky mud they were unusable almost our whole tenure. |
But all is not lost, for us anyway. One of the backcountry roads that was still accessible is the one that goes to Chloride City, a ghost mine. I call it that because remnants of the "town" have ceased to exist. The only thing left are the mine shafts and some assorted mining equipment.
My son, Chad asked if I wanted to go and I jumped at the chance. We got to the access point, dropped the air pressure in the tires and headed up the mountain.
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Chad's truck is set up for high clearance roads. It's got a lift kit,
large diameter tires and off-road Bilstein shocks. |
As we crested the top of the pass, the view wasn't bad.
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That peak way in the distance is Mt. Whitney, California's highest peak at 14,505'.
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When we got to Chloride City there wasn't much left to see. Time and scavengers had erased most of it. We stepped into the entrance of a couple of the mines and one of the dynamite storage bunkers. I don't know how those guys did it. That had to be some extremely hard living.
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| Inside, looking out of a dynamite storage bunker. |
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Entrance to the dynamite bunker.
What a view in the distance. |
One of the "perks" of working for the Park Service is that we get employee dining room (EDR) privileges at the concessionaire's property. When we have had about all we can stand of our own cooking we'll pop over to the EDR and plop down our six bucks each for access to the buffet. Sometimes it's okay, sometimes we remember why we eat our own cooking for so long. Our last week we partook of the EDR several times. While there one day we realized that in the two years we had been coming to Death Valley, we didn't have a single photograph of our time in the EDR. Time to fix that.
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| Last lunch and only photo we ever took at the EDR. |
Of course there were other dining choices. The public dining room that is also a buffet can be had for $29/head. And that's the low cost option. Two cheeseburgers with fries from the Ice Cream Parlor will run you $40. A scoop if ice cream at said place is $8/scoop. An entree in the Tavern starts around $50. We splurged one time and got the cheeseburgers. They were good but not $40 good. But that's life in the remote desert for you.
Something else that we had never done in all our time was explore The Inn. This is the high end property of the two that Xantera owns. Room rates are start around $800/night during peak periods. There are rooms you can have for much more.
The Inn is old but has gone through several updates that have kept it attractive and modernly functional. On one of our last days off we popped over to see how the other half lives. I can tell you they live pretty good.
We never say never but right now there are no plans to return.
Chad videoed our final departure from Death Valley.
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