Tuesday, April 08, 2008

Death Valley Trip - Panamint Springs

2007-03-18 to 20. We spent three nights at the Panamint Springs Resort, on the west side of Death Valley National Park. It's a funky roadside motel located at an altitude of 2000 feet in the Argus Mountains. It was built in the 1937 as a wayside rest for miners travelling in and out of Death Valley. It has a good restaurant with a full menu, a gas station and convenience store, and a camp site. Across the valley one can see the spectacular west face of the Panamint Mountains, which rise to 11,000 feet. One morning, when I hiked out to the edge of the plateau, I watched two Airforce test planes racing back and forth through the valley. You can barely see one in the photo below. The Panamint Dunes are just visible in the photo below (the pale oval patch in the valley). They are reputed to be worth a visit, but they're accessible only by four-wheel drive, so we didn't venture out there. Some of the dunes rise to 250 feet. I took a telephot shot of them.

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