After a breakfast of Spam, bacon, and eggs on the ridge, we packed up and started cruising south along the Middle Park Ridge toward the South Park area. The ridge driving is slow and exposed, with Death Valley proper on the driver's side and Middle Park Valley on the passenger's. We stopped constantly.
The ridge gives you a weird sense of scale. You can see entire valleys laid out below you, mountain ranges stacked behind each other for what feels like forever. As we pushed south, the terrain ahead started to open up and we could make out where we'd eventually drop down into the South Park basin.
It's incredible how different this area looked compared to two years prior. On the Thanksgiving trip, South Park was a flat, lifeless dust bowl. This time it was green. Actual green. We revisited some of the mine artifacts we'd found on the previous trip to see how they were holding up. Unsurprisingly, the desert had left them exactly as we found them.
From the basin, the trail turned west and started dropping us into the narrow passages of South Park Canyon. The descent was slow, steep, and punctuated by a couple of rock features that demanded full attention. The biggest of them: chicken rock.
After several miles of slow downhill and a few sketchy rock features, we made it to our destination for the night. The original plan was Briggs Cabin, but as often happens, it was already occupied. So we settled for Stone Cabin, the slightly smaller, slightly less luxurious option down the road.
The day was still young and the heat made sitting around a musty cabin less appealing than the air-conditioned comfort of our vehicles. Gary hadn't been to Gohler Wash before, and it was just around the corner, so we unloaded some gear, raised a flag to claim the cabin, and hit the trail again to show him the spots we'd found back in 2021.
The Gohler Wash detour was mostly a replay of the Winter Camping (Jan 2021) trip, so there's not much new to report and not many photos to show for it. The biggest takeaway was that it was significantly hotter on the valley floor than it had been up in the canyon. We didn't linger and backtracked to Stone Cabin.
Back at Stone Cabin, we swept rodent droppings off the bunks, laid out our sleeping bags, and called it a night. Or tried to. The donkeys had other plans. If you've never heard a burro bray echoing off canyon walls in the middle of the night, count yourself lucky. No sound engineer working on a horror movie has ever created anything half as unsettling. At least they look cute while drinking water.