Attempt at Valle De La Muerte

After exiting the Valle de la Luna, we made an attempt to go to Valle de la Muerte. We were told it was close and doable on a bike within the time frame in which we had rented our bikes. Now I believe this was just a sales pitch to get us to rent the bikes.

Coming back to the highway from the Valle de la Luna provided our first down hill cruise of the day as you can see in the next two photos.

Once we reached the highway again, the terrain was a different story. Although it was easier because it was pavement it was all uphill for as far as we could see.
The views from the side of the road were almost as cool as what we'd seen at the Valle de la Luna.
Going uphill...
Still heading uphill...
When does this hill end?
Just around the corner then we ought to be at the top, right?
Well by the time we got to what we thought was the top of the hill, we realized we weren't going to have enough time to make it to the Valle de la Muerte. The road continued to go up hill, so we just took some photos from here and returned back to town.
The down hill was so much fun, but I had to reign it in, because I easily escaped Sita by wide margins and she was scared that I was going to fast (I probably was, I think I probably came close to 50 or 60 mph). I stopped repeatedly to let Sita catch up. In the photo below I let her pass me and go on for some time, fully confident that I would catch up again. Hey, what can I say, it pays to be heavier then your riding partner on the downhill. I caught up without even pedaling. I couldn't pedal, I was going to fast.
The next few photos are of us coming back into town as the sun started to set.

Valle De La Luna

It's been quite a long time since I've uploaded anything to this blog, but after discussing this vacation with several people recently I decided it was time to make some more posts, hopefully I can get the rest of my photos up this weekend (Thanksgiving weekend). I've held a desire to finish posting all the photos to this blog since we got back, but I could never find time, let's see if I've found it now. BTW, I think Thanksgiving is the greatest American holiday so I want to wish you all a happy Thanksgiving.

I made a post showing the pictures of the journey to the Valle De La Luna, but I did not show the pictures of the Valle yet. We got to a point where we could see that there were clearly no more vehicle tracks except those made to turn the vehicle around. There wasn't even a non-sandy strip for us to travel on with our bikes...


...so we left our bikes and climbed the nearest hill. Once at the top we decided we must be at the Valle De La Luna and proceeded to take it all in. The next few pictures were taken from the hill we climbed. It was a rare cloudy day and although it did not rain even one drop the sky provided a stark contrast for the land below.






For those who've been waiting to see sand in this desert the following few photos ought to do.

The wind kept kicking up dust into our eyes so we had to be careful not to trot through the sand too much.
When we did hike through the sand we left quite a trail

A lot of the tourists try sand-boarding at this location. You can see one of them in the lower right quadrant of this photo. We decided we didn't want to bother with this and were later told this was a wise decision as you spend more time climbing to the top of each hill, than you do boarding down.
Having seen the sand boarders further in the Valle than we were, we assumed there must be more to the canyon so we pushed our bikes through the sand that was impassible for the vehicles and once again found a trail. We didn't make it too far before discovering that if we wanted to go further it would be a mix between biking and pushing the bikes, so we decided to turn back after a short way, the next few pictures are from further in the Valle.


One new thing that we discovered further in the Valle were veins of rock that looked a lot like marble to me, but they could've just as easily been some kind of salt compound for all we knew. I took three pictures of them anyway.