“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” — Winston Churchill.
February 2026
An overnighter to view the Condor petroglyphs. I had never heard of these before so when I finally did, I sleuthed out the location and created a long looping route stitching together both past routes I've done and new to me areas into a long 400+ mile route through and around Death Valley National Park. I then added it to my backlog of trips to do.
Early February finally afforded the opportunity to ride the route.
I packed my bike in the late afternoon and rode for several hours before making camp in the canyon.
The next morning I rode up and over the pass and down to a predetermined spot to leave my bike and begin the relatively short hike to the petroglyph panels. I am purposely not disclosing the exact location of these glyphs although if I can find them so can you.
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| Marble Bath again looking rather sad. |
The panel's are stunning!
After viewing the panel's and hiking back to my bike I continued on down to the springs and made camp for the night. I took a nice soak in the warm springs before retiring to my tent. Unfortunately a dust storm came up that night and made the zippers on my tent wholly unusable. It's more than a little embarrasing because I didn't understand then that this was an easily field repairable event and it ended up causing me to abort the rest of my trip because I knew the weather was changing in few days to rain and possibly snow. Fighting my way out of the tent in the morning, I made the agonizing decision to ride back out the way I came in.
My riding partner was supposed to be coming in today and I expected to see him on the way out. As I arrived back to my truck, he was just pulling up...surprise! For details on the rest of the route please see his blog post Mega Death Tour - Death Valley. Kurstin made a huge effort and completed the rest of the route in challenging conditions and now solo. But it was mere training for his Big Brazil Trip that followed.