Monday, April 11, 2022. Death Valley and an encounter with a Haboob
The winds rocked us through the night but the RV stayed at a comfortable temperature as the outside temperatures had dropped into the 50’s by the morning. There was no apparent damage to the RV from the winds. We headed out at 7:30am. Our first stop was the city of Ridgecrest where we used the bathrooms at Walmart and filled up the RV at the Eastridge Market on the edge of town with diesel at $5.99/gal. It took 4.428 gal to fill. The odometer read 16350. The mileage since last fill was 15.6mpg. There is quite a collection of old Air Force and Navy jets on display all around Ridgecrest, and there is a Naval Airstation at China Lake.
We then headed for Death Valley National Park, going up US 395 from Ridgecrest to Olancha in a valley that runs parallel to Death Valley, where we took on last chance diesel at a Mobile station, adding 4.595gal @$6.599/gal with 16406 miles on the odometer (only 12.2mpg). As we left that filling station, the driver information panel notified me that the DEF (diesel exhaust fluid) level was getting low. Normally, when that notification comes on, you have a couple hundred miles to go before the computer starts to limit the performance of the engine to prevent people from polluting the air rather than pay for the DEF refills. The vehicles can run perfectly well without DEF, but they belch emissions that are bad for the planet.
We passed the largely dry Lake Owens, lined with salt evaporation lagoons. This looks like a place that may become more important as demand for lithium skyrockets. We entered into the West side of the park at the Father Crowley Vista Point.
Ironically, Father Crowley Vista Point only offers a peek-a-boo look into Death Valley, but is on a ridge that runs along a narrow canyon where Navy and Airforce pilots do low altitude high speed terrain following training. There weren’t any jets flying when we were there, but they say it’s a popular activity among locals to watch the jets screaming through the canyon at and below eye level, close enough to see into the cockpits as they blaze by. It’s probably where the Star Wars series got it’s inspiration for the pod racing scenes.
Descending into Death Valley reveals a very primitive and otherworldly landscape with rainbows of colors made by tilted stacks of innumerable oxidizing layers representing a chaotic and violent seismic past.
We learned that Death Valley has a well deserved reputation for being one of the hottest places on Earth. This is partly due to a positive feedback loop created by air being trapped between two very high ridges. When the sun heats up the surface of the valley floor, hot air rises, but it is trapped between the ridges. When it cools, it rushes down the sides of the ridges and heats up by compression. So it ends up being the world’s biggest convection oven.
From Father Crowley’s Vista Point, we took the Emigrant Canyon Road up to Wildrose, where a CCC camp was based and where a row of charcoal kilns, looking like giant bee hives, stand in a row. These were used to make charcoal from pinyon pines that was used in smelting silver nearby. They are quite an interesting and unique sight. They are at the end of a 26 mile long dead end road.
Along the way, we saw many wildflowers blossoming along the road and we also ran into a herd of wild burros grazing near the side of the road.
Stovepipe wells is a resort with a general store, campground, cabins and hotel. Just beyond that is the Mesquite Flat Sand dunes, created by airborne sand being trapped between the upper valley and the mountains blocking the southern exit. These dunes were reminiscent of dunes we had seen outside Dubai on a cruise ship excursion, but there were no camels in the Death Valley dunes.
We decided to use our emergency diesel Jerry cans to allow us to drive to the Ubehebe Crater at the north end of the park. It is at the end of a 40 mile dead end road. It was formed by rising magma hitting underground water, causing a massive explosion. There are many such craters in Death Valley. When these form, they also hurl huge chunks of the overlying valley floor into the sky, landing haphazardly as hummocks around the valley floor. The wind around the rim of the crater was insane. It must have been gusting at over 60mph. It was very hard to maintain a grip on an iPhone as you tried to snap pictures while being buffetted. We could see people down in the bottom of the crater looking like tiny ants. They must have had their hats blown off into the crater and they had to hike down to fetch them.
As we drove back from the crater, we could see an ominous dark cloud approaching from the south. It was a Haboob- a giant sand storm. It was heading north as we were driving south, and it caught us about 10 miles before the junction of the crater road and other main roads of the park. It was like driving through a blizzard with very poor visibility.
We had to slow to 30mph and could only see 100-200 feet ahead of us at times. As soon as we came to a turn off that would lead us up out of the valley, we took it, but soon found that our RV couldn’t go any more than 25-30mph even with the throttle floored. The road was uphill, but the RV had not had any trouble going up steeper hills earlier in the day. Since we had been driving through the Haboob, the thought occurred that the air filter might be clogged. Looking at the engine performance gauge, which can display real time horsepower and torque output, it was apparent that the engine was in a limp mode, limiting horsepower to no more than 100. The engine, oil and transmission temperatures were all ok, but with less than 100hp, all we could do is crawl out of the valley at 25-30mph. The check engine light came on during this time as well. Besides a possible problem with the air filter being clogged by sand, it is also possible that the DEF warning might be triggering the limp mode. As we climbed up the valley wall to the town of Beatty NV, we climbed out of the Haboob and onto level ground. We were relieved that the RV was able to get up to 60mph on the level and downhill, but slowed significantly on hills because of the limitation on horsepower.
We got to the Amargosa Valley Rest Stop on US95 where we were planning on spending the night. We refueled the RV. The convenience store attached to the filling station also sold DEF, so we refilled the DEF tank in case this might have been contributing to the engine being put into a limp mode. The station also had a well lit parking area and cellular service, so Ben looked up a YouTube video on changing the air filter on a Sprinter, and got to work taking the air filter housing apart. Sure enough, there was a layer of fine tan sand in the bottom of the air filter intake box, and banging the filter element on the sidewalk yielded a nice pile of fine sand. We had fortunately packed our portable Dyson vacuum cleaner, which we used to get the sand out of the air filter intake box.
Janet encountered burros along the roadside in Amargosa Valley who seem to have made themselves at home. in the city.
We drove the very short distance from the filling station to the Amargosa Valley rest stop, where we made dinner of Kevin’s Paleo Lemongrass Chicken from Costco and rice in the microwave running on the inverter. The rice takes 20 minutes and the Chicken with added fresh asparagus took another 10 minutes so that was asking a lot of our lithium batteries. That dropped them to 59%, but we should be able to get through the night just fine on that before the sun starts recharging them again in the morning.
