The Racetrack, Death Valley

Last year, one of the highlights of our road trip was an unplanned side trip to Death Valley. This time we planned to go through the Valley again on our way to Bishop, but we didn't have any specific ideas for where we wanted to go within the park. Keep in mind that the park is more than 3 million acres, so we had some narrowing down to do. I had read and seen pictures of a famous (and famously inaccessible) playa called The Racetrack (highly recommended link). Having never had a 4 wheel drive car before, except for my extremely low clearance Audi A4, I had never had the opportunity to see it. Since we just bought an Outback 4x4 with 8 inches of clearance, now seemed like the perfect time to go. The one problem is that the road to the racetrack is BAD. Here is the NPS Caveat:

Racetrack Valley Road
High clearance 2WD. 34 miles of loose gravel, washboard, some protruding rocks. Moderate and long uphill grade (2400' in 9 miles). Sedans, vans and campers do negotiate this road occasionally but are not recommended. Posted 4WD, high clearance due to changing road conditions and irregular maintenance. Flat tires are common on this road; be sure your spare is in good shape. No camping first two miles or from Teakettle Junction to the southern end of the Racetrack

After taking a brief look at Scotty's Castle, we headed out on the road south from Ubehebe crater:

The conditions at the information shack in Beatty had warned of "extreme washboarding" (washboarding=undulations in the road which makes driving a jaw rattling experience), and the road did not disappoint:


It's been my experience that if you can keep the car on the road, going faster is usually better on washboards, and the Subie didn't have any problem at all doing that. We overtook a couple of SUVs on the final few miles from teakettle junction to the playa, and pulled over near a rocky outcrop sometimes called "the grandstand". Our car was pretty dusty, but survived without a scratch or bump. Thankfully, it was only afterwards that I learned about the reputation of this dirt road to explode shock absorbers, flatten tires, bend wheels and generally destroy cars.


We wandered around the beautiful cracked mud surface for a while and took some pictures






It's sad, but we could see places where morons had dragged rocks across the surface to simulate the natural movement of the rocks over the lake (discussed at the wikipedia link above). Since most of the moving rocks can be found at the southern end of the playa, we continued south, parked and wandered from stone to stone. Even without the intrigue of the moving rocks, the racetrack playa is a stunning place. The yellow-brown cracked mud and multicolored rocky mountains are spectacular. I took quite a few medium format shots, but also some digital shots to give you an idea of what it is like:






Going back North turned out to be much faster, and I got to test the rally bred subaru technology with nice drifts and a few lock ups of the ABS. Heres a little quicktime movie clip
(5 MB)
Interestingly, our car seemed to do much better on the dirt road than SUVs in their supposed natural environment. I like to think about how mystified those guys in Yukons and Expeditions were to see a little red Subaru coming up behind them at twice their speed! I guess the joke will be on me if things start falling off our car.

When we got back to Ubehebe we had a look around the crater




And then perhaps foolishly, took the "road" North that said "Big Pine, 75 miles:". At this point we had traveled at least 50 miles on pretty bad dirt roads. The road up to Big Pine is actually a slightly better, but still dirt and washboarded road.

We actually saw quite a few chunks of cars along the way, and I took over the driving after Chloe augered into a big rut in the road and got us airborne on the bounce. There were also sections of soft sand where washes intersected the road. After miles of this, it got dark and the road started winding up a mountain, just to add a little steepness to the mixture. We were both relieved to see pavement near the top of the grade, which turned out to be hanging rock canyon. The smoothness of the road was wonderful after ~80 total miles of dirt roads, and we were both in high spirits until it abruptly ended and spat us out onto more dirt road! I'm not sure why that section of road in particular is paved, but I'm sure there's a good story. I always thought that people built roads out from their ends, rather than picking a point in the middle and building outwards, but hey.. it's death valley. Finally we made it to a bona fide road, which looked very familiar even in the dark, and I realized that it was the same road that my friends and I had driven many, many times almost twenty years earlier in order to look for lizards and snakes. Half an hour later we found a hotel in Bishop (The Outdoorsman) for $54 with free wifi and a great free breakfast. Just next door is the Creekside Inn, which wanted $200 a night!! This seemed like a particularly bad deal considering that we stayed at a castle for $50 less. My only complaint was that we were right next to the ice machine. Even when it is below freezing outside, people still apparently need their ice at 2 in the morning. Luckily I had earplugs.