Death Valley 6-10-11

A few weekends ago a group of us from work took an overnight camping trip into Death Valley. We left Friday morning and returned Saturday night. We left Ridgecrest and headed north to Olancha. From there we hit dirt roads and would not see much pavement again for the next 200 miles.

 

 As we started north into the park we began to climb in elevation.  We were driving through the pine trees and the temperature was a pleasant 65 degrees.  Sadly, this was not going to last and we would soon drop into the valleys where the predicted high was near 100.

 

Our first real stop, besides a quick lunch break during the descent, was at Tea Kettle Junction.  As you can see people bring tea kettles from all over and leave them, usually with a message, at the junction's sign.  Next stop: the Race Track. 

The Race Track (I also suggest viewing the night time panoramic shot on the Wiki page in full size) is famous for its mysterious moving rocks that leave paths across the dry lake bed.

Some of the paths were quite interesting, making zig-zag marks, for others it appeared as though the rocks had split into multiple pieces during their travels.

Our next stop from here was the Ubehebe Crater, it was getting later in the day when we got there and the wind was fairly strong so we decided against the hike around the crater. 

Although the pictures don't really show it the crater is half a mile wide and 500 to 777 feet deep.

As I said the wind was quite strong and the updraft out of the crater was amazing.

From the crater we headed to our camping spot at the Eureka Dunes.  There was still a fair bit of wind when we got there but it calmed as the sun went down.  We made a dinner of fajitas with a dutch oven peach cobbler for desert.

The next morning we got up and went and played on the dunes, I quickly overdid it climbing one quickly and made myself feel sick for a bit.  We went back down to camp and had a breakfast of bacon, egg, and cheese breakfast burritos with pancakes.

We broke camp and one truck took off for the highway route back home while the other two of us circled to the other side of the dunes to take another off-road trail back.  Our progress was quickly haulted when we got to a (the) rough section of the trail.  It looked bad enough that the trucks probably would have come out with body damage so we turned back.

We headed out where the other truck had gone towards Big Pine.

We stopped and ate at a local place when we got to Big Pine.  Then we proceeded down Highway 14 back to Ridgecrest.  A total trip of about 320 miles, with well over half being off-road and no problems, not bad for  a truck with ~150,000 miles.

More Pictures Here!  Password is dv2011

Grill time

We bought a grill the other day, took it out of the box and the lid was crunched.  So, two days I took it back and waited for Home Depot to go through their boxes until they found a good one...the third box off the top shelf.  We assembled it in the garage the next day and then a few days later got the first food (burgers) grilled.  We have since done burgers again and kabobs tonight.

  

Home Improvement

Here are the pictures of some of the improvements that were made with the help of both our parents.  The original plan was to have Angela's parents help us paint and my parents help us move.  It turned into the opposite, mostly due to moving time constraints.  The paint change in the bathroom is the most obvious and biggest.  Its harder to see the changes in the colors of the living room and into the kitchen, but it really changed the house and made it feel more like home.

Other upgrades are Angela's kitchen faucet that dad installed, and risers for the shower heads in both bathrooms, ours also got a new shower head.

New Home

Just thought I would post some pictures of our new home.  Click Me!!!

Shooting - post II

All has or had been going well in the shooting class.  We had been shooting prone, with and without a rest and my lowest score had been a 40/50 on the first day and a 49/50 on the second outing.  I don't have my targets back yet, but last class was the beginning of the sitting position, and I did not figure it out yet.  I'll be happy if I got a 30 on more then one of them.

Shooting Class

In an effort to slow the boredom of living in Ridgecrest I have signed up for a shooting class that began a few weeks ago and will run through May sometime.  Yesterday was our second shooting day, and we got our targets back from the first day:

In Case you do not want to open the picture, I did ok.  We are shooting Savage single shot bolt action target .22LR @ 50 ft with peep sights.  I think we will be moving further out later in the class.  This last class was trying to get them better sighted in, and shooting prone with no rest.  I'll post those when we get them back.

Here is what I see through the the peep sights:

And that little dot is all the black center area (rings 6,7,8,9,10) of the target.  I'm not real sure how far out we can shoot reliably with these sights.

The Computer

My laptop had been running a little slow, so I ordered another gig o' ram to top it off at 2 GB.  Turns out, while one ram chip is easy to access on a panel on the bottom of the laptop, the other is placed under the keyboard...I had to Google that one on the touch since the computer was already apart.  So, one thing lead to another and I ended up with the computer looking like this:

 

My screen hinges were a little loose and one of my mouse buttons had gone screwy.  Well it turns out that some of the screen hinge screws are inaccessible (permanently), so that got tightened up best I could and super glued. 

The screwy mouse turned out to be a broken rubber nub under the button so I ordered a new one from Ebay for $24.  One week later I had a new replacement that replaces the the entire lower and mouse (lower left two silver pieces in the picture.  And now:

 

So the computer is up and running good again with the new mouse and its faster.  I also got a 2 TB hard drive to offload all the junk to.