Since I discovered Tecopa Hot Springs I’ve done this jog between Lone Pine and Las Vegas or Joshua Tree four or five times in order to soak there, and thus I’ve ended up passing by Panamint Springs all those times also. It has always looked enticing from the road, but as with so many good-looking situations, when you settle in to live with it the defects become apparent.
WHUFU page for: Panamint Springs Resort
Only thing going between Lone Pine and Death Valley. It looked a lot more alluring when driving past than it does now that I'm staying here. Maybe when I get a beer and hang out on the veranda I'll like it better. It does have showers!
Register at the gas station, not the restaurant as you might expect.
tonight:
only thing going between Lone Pine and Death Valley. It looked a lot more alluring when driving past than it does now that I'm plunked down here. Maybe when I get a beer and hang out on the veranda I'll like it better. It does have showers!
As you zoom past Panamint, there is the “campground” (a stretch of gravel with a couple of trees) on the north, and a building on the south. The building has a big veranda and is labeled as a restaurant. I envisioned it as a sort of lodge, where campers could just hang out, chilling on the porch. Not so much really. It’s a bar/restaurant, and you can tell they want you to buy something to hang out. Still, it IS a bar/restaurant across the street from an otherwise godforsaken desert campground, and that ain’t bad! They gave me the tent site with the best shade, #15, but this time of the day it wasn’t shady enough. So I set myself up on the east side of my van (a ten foot tall van gives pretty good shade!) and fiddled till close to sunset, then took this laptop and my wallet across the street to drink a tall, cold, 24oz IPA draft on the porch and listen to the birds and watch the shadows lengthen across the wide valley. I ate Safeway food at the van, because their food was expensive – $16 for a burger. But beer was reasonable if you get a giant one … which I did!
Later there was some Saturday night excitement when one of those gigantic RVs built like a bus got stuck halfway in the parking lot and blocking most of the highway. It had a very low clearance, and he seemed to have tried to return to the road at an angle where the edge of the road caught the middle of the bus, lifting the rear wheels just enough so they couldn’t engage the surface, and that was that! Despite the best amateur efforts of the locals and their puny pickup trucks, Mr Rich Guy and his big bus remained stuck for about three hours, until the pro with the very large tow truck finally rolled in from Lone Pine. By then I was wandering the edges of the desert beyond the campground – it’s a waxing gibbous moon!!! Turns out that 100 yards away from the road is a giant trash dump for the last 80 years or so worth of crap from the occupants of this little enclave. Tin cans, car parts, all kinds of random stuff – a little depressing.
Sunday (May 19)
I was awakened at dawn by howling winds. I went out and battened down the few things I’d left outside, my table and chair, bath stuff. In truth, I had left my towel hanging on the rear view mirror, and that was what actually made me take action, everything else I woulda took my chances. As long as I was out there I battened down the books and maps that the bicycle dude next door had left out. As discussed earlier, I see few dawns, so I stayed up a while to take it in. Because of the mountains, there’s a looong time between first light and actual sun.
Awake again 10-ish. The wind has died down, and the heat inside the van is rising, so time to get moving. I putter for a while, decide NOT to go across the road for breakfast buffet or even coffee. Stovepipe Wells, a big time Death Valley campground complex, is 50 miles down the road and I decide to do my morning things there, to get a feel for it compared to where I am.
It turn out to be more or less the same deal as Panamint, better in some ways, not better in others. The campground has absolutely no shade (not better!). It is just a large gravel lot broken into rows of parking spots with a picnic table. I got a coffee at the general store and sat in a rocking chair and ate some of the goodies I had squirreled away. I was in the shade, but the air felt like god was pointing a giant hair dryer in my face! The bar/restaurant across the street had a bigger and more spacious feeling than the bar/restaurant at Panamint, and there IS an additional hangout area for guests. Overall verdict: I think it’ll be Stovepipe Wells next time!
There had been a spring-time coolness back in the Owens Valley, but it is just plain hot in Death Valley. 101 degrees today! I did one little side trip to check out the Twenty Mule Team borax mining site, but it’s not the kind of weather that makes me want to explore.
Stovepipe Wells is only the second biggest complex in the park. Furnace Springs is the biggest. There are a couple of really substantial artesian springs that power the whole place. It used to be a date farm, and date palms suck a lot of water! It has campgrounds, stores, restaurants and a bar, just like Stovepipe, except everything is just a little more mega.
I ate a very tasty and well-executed spinach salad to make me feel healthier, then I hung out in the shade and fiddled with my iPhone for an hour … because … there is a cell phone tower right here! This is the only good phone reception for 100 miles in any direction.
In the course of my phone browsing I remembered that Ash Meadows NWR is not too far from here. I’ve never gone there because there’s no place to camp nearby, but I already know I’m camping at Tecopa tonight, and I have plenty of daylight, and I have no particular plans for the rest of the day, so why not make today the day I see what’s up with …
WHUFU page for: Ash Meadow NWR
very remote, no camping nearby, not like the NWRs I'm used to. Lotta driving to individual cool little habitats tucked away, one big pond and a couple of really beautiful cold springs.
tonight:
I didn't see much wildlife except a couple of jackrabbits.
It was not what I expected. I guess it was pretty interesting, but I was a little too hot and tired to really get with it. Instead of the usual marshes and ponds with lots of ducks, this was boring grassland with a couple of really interesting habitats centered around lovely fresh water springs, many miles apart. So you would drive through miles of grassy nothingness, turn down a dead end gravel road for five miles, get out and check out the (really quite pretty and restful) springs, wish you could jump in, get back in the car and drive the five dusty miles back out to the main dusty road, drive some more and do it again, and that’s your interaction with the Refuge. Well, now I know… Back to Death Valley Junction to pick up the familiar road to the hot springs.
WHUFU page for: Tecopa Hot Springs
Odd place. Separate bathhouses for men and women, nudity required. Camping is available in glorified parking lot across the road overlooking the settlement pond.
No potable water, must drive a couple of miles for that. Really interesting salt flats area at the edge of town. In the last couple of years a pair of restaurants have opened. And breweries!
tonight:
First time! Very strong winds, so I spent all the time I wasn't at the pools huddling in the camper shell.
Monday
Soak again. Last night I’d done a little walking exploration of a place called Tecopa Hot Springs Resort – an entirely different place from Tecopa Hot Springs, the place I am at. Their little restaurant was open but I didn’t go in, so this morning I am primed to return there and fortify myself with a coffee before tackling the bleak, barren 85 mile run to the western edge of Las Vegas.
This was a FAIL. The “Bistro” is only open at night. This solidly fortifies the general impression of uselessness that this competing “resort” gives me. I did check out their office – the OPEN sign is out but the door is locked, of course. There was a useful map that answered the basic question I have about the place: where ARE the alleged mineral baths?? Map sez: they are right up the hill! I drove up and peeked in at them and there are indeed two good-sized tubs in separate rooms. Final verdict: I will stick with my current Tecopa destination. Funky as it is, it is still more user-friendly than this place. It I was a romantic couple I probably prefer this place, having to go to separate sex-segregated bath houses is a sure-fire romantic buzzkill.
The drive to Las Vegas seemed unusually boring. It was a lot quicker since I didn’t stop at the date ranch this time. Red Rocks is still stunning off to the right. I forgot about the town of Mountain Home, kinda cute up in the mountains. As I neared the city I wanted to check my impressions from last time. I remembered a wall of condos stretching forever. It wasn’t quite dramatic as I recalled, but indeed, there is a definite edge to the suburban sprawl – on one side is gravel and sagebrush (the natural landscape), on the other is apartments and roads and signs and strip malls. The dividing line is Fort Apache Road, ha ha. I have more time today, so the plan is to identify a coffee place with wifi and go straight there. This worked really well.
Without Yelp I would never have come to this place. It’s just a storefront in a new but already run-down (that’s Vegas!) strip mall. It was clean and spacious with friendly help and good food and coffee, and even a jigsaw puzzle going in the corner (be still my pounding heart!). Sketchy neighboorhood, weird Vegas people (even in the burbs), but quite nice. I stayed an hour in this oasis of calm and cool and planned the rest of my Vegas day.
The big discovery is that there is a Trader Joe’s more or less on my way out of town! I am excited by this. I get diesel, buy way too much stuff at TJ’s ($91!), then hop on the freeway to the exit for the Hoover Dam.
It is no longer the case that all traffic on US 93 headed to Kingman AZ must drive across the dam. They’ve build a quite dramatic arch bridge across the chasm of the Colorado River. Even better, they’ve made walking out to the middle of the bridge to look at the dam part of the dam tourist experience. It was pretty cool. I’ve always loved the Art Deco style of the dam.
After some research I decide to drive past boring Boulder Beach Campground, to go the extra 12 miles to Las Vegas Bay Campground. What a name! That ought to be the name of the supervillian’s casino in an Iron Man movie – Las Vegas Bay (not a Batman movie, that would be Gotham Bay :) Anyway, LVBC turned out to be almost perfect.
WHUFU page for: Las Vegas Bay Campground
Still quiet and cheap and convenient, EXCEPT for the generators which always seem to be running here during the permissible hours. But really, a $10 (or $5 for seniors) nice campground 16 miles from the edge of Las Vegas ... gotta take the bad with the good. Checks not accepted, so make sure to have that $5 bill!
tonight:
a real find for me! Just a perfect spot for my purposes. Quiet and cheap and convenient, quite close to Las Vegas and to Hoover Dam. Much more congenial to me than Boulder Beach Campground, which is one of those giant marina campgrounds like Echo Bay.
It’s on a bluff high above the lake. In fact it mostly looks over the canyon of the Las Vegas River. It’s quiet and pretty. I saw a roadrunner coming in, and there was a family of quail that were there in the evening and the morning. There was a very pretty trail out of the campground, that followed the rim of the river canyon for well over a mile, until I got tired of following it. Since it’s still a waxing gibbous moon I could go till well after sunset. Everything was great except for the one butthead running his generator from 7 to 10pm, spoiling the otherwise perfectly quiet evening for everybody else in the camp. I had an un-mellow moment where I had to crab at the nice old guy. But geez, he trashed the best part of everyone else’s nature experience by running his very loud, un-muffled engine.
Tuesday
I’ve spent a couple of hours this morning staring at maps and and my camping app and Yelp and back to the maps. This is my decision point for the next week or so. When I leave the campground to join Lake Mead Parkway, should I:
- take a right and go over the top of Lake Mead – to Zion, Lee’s Ferry, Monument Valley – the northern AZ plan.
- take a left back to the Hoover Dam bridge, then on to Kingman, Prescott, Sedona, Flagstaff – the central AZ plan.
Stupidly, I think my decision is being influenced by the fact that I have a nice casino breakfast waiting for me eleven miles to the left, vs absolutely nothing in the food/coffee line awaiting me on the right for the whole day. Rightward, I would drive blank nothingness for a couple of hours, then camp in (very scenic) blank nothingness at Valley of Fire.
Final factor: on the 2010 trip, bad weather prevented me from visiting the excellent towns of Jerome and Sedona, both super cool places I remember very fondly from the 80’s. The reason I even thought of this possibility was to see my friend Ben. That may or may not work out, but I think I’m doing it anyway.
Casino breakfast was everything I’d hoped it would be! Casino wifi was slow and spotty, but better than nuthin! The casino itself is kind of an odd duck. Everything around it is federal land, either Lake Mead or Hoover Dam, but there it is this big ole casino, all by itself right on US 93 a third of a mile from the new bridge over the Colorado River. The busy four lane highway slows from 65 to 35 just for the casino.