Death Valley 49ers Encampment -The Racetrack

From The Kanab, Utah area we traveled west toward Las Vegas.  After doing some shopping and picking up mail in St George, Utah; we found a BLM area to the west of Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada.  We spent a couple of nights there.  No hookups, totally quiet and good Verizon cell signal.

We broke camp and headed toward Death Valley on Oct 31st.  Stopping for gas in North Las Vegas we arrived in the early afternoon at Sunset campground in Furnace Creek.  The campground is basically a gravel parking lot with fresh water and a dump station but no hookups.  We picked a site in one of the overflow lots (reasoning that the traffic would be minimal away from the entrance and the dump station).

Members of the Escapees Boomers group arrived a few days later.

In the meantime, we did one of our bucket list items by visiting the the Racetrack Playa.  The dry lake bed known as the Racetrack is located in a fairly remote section of Death Valley.  We did not go to the Racetrack during our 2017 visit due to its remoteness.

From the Furnace Creek campground we traveled about 50 miles north on paved roads to the Ubehebe crater.  Then there is about 27 miles of rough gravel road to reach the lakebed.

Stopped at the Ubehebe crater to take some pictures and to air down the jeep tires.The crater appears to be a volcanic ash vent.

View of the Racetrack at about 2 miles.

The Racetrack lakebed (appearing to be about 5 square miles) is in a valley surrounded by mountains with no outlet for any water from the scarce winter rainfall.  The water on the lake drys to a concrete hard clay surface.  The movement of the thin skin of ice in the winter is thought to be the reason that  some of the rocks littering the lakebed appear to move.

We found only a couple of rocks that seem  to have made tracks on the lake surface.  We spent about an hour and a half walking about the lakebed and its center island, the "Grandstand".  Truely a surreal location.

On our return route we stopped at Teakettle Junction.  The origin of its name is not clear.  However, there are quite a number of teakettles hanging on the signpost.

Our return to the campground was uneventful.