Death Valley Roadtrip 14 Mar 1998

On March 14th, Chris and I joined a couple of bears from Los Angeles for a roadtrip to Death Valley. That's me, the fearless leader, with the Butchmobile (above). Our goal was to see one of the blooms of the century: Death Valley, which normally gets around 2 inches of rain a year, had received over 5" (all of 120mm, for the metrically inclined!) So we had to go and see what all the desert wildflower stuff was about.

I organized this by how we around--our first stop was in the Searles Valley, just to the west of Death Valley. For those who want to jump ahead:

• Around Trona and the Searles Valley
• Through the Panamint Valley
• Into northern Death Valley and the sheets of sunflowers
• Side trip to the mouth of Echo Canyon (where the picture above was taken)
• Poking around near Ashford Mills
• At the south end of the valley

Next, to the Searles Valley...

A small note: most of the images are around 70KB, not as small as I'd like. But they're generally worth it, if you like pretty flowers... like me.