DLC Adventure Report Thread - Post Your Trips! (1 Viewer)

[bamabrock]

So many of us are taking small trips but we dont have a thread for people to post their adventures. How about we have a thread to document cool trips we've taken? Feel free to share pics, experiences, GPX tracks, etc of your most recent or favorite trips. Hopefully, we can build a log of near and far trip ideas!

 

[wrigh003]

Rode up to Little River Canyon with a buddy last weekend to get some dirt on the wheels after a bunch of repairs and old car deferred maintenance stuff. Truck didn't break, nobody got stuck or washed down the river. Altogether, a good half day in the woods - but a pretty long ride from Gardendale for not too much wheeling.

Pretty up there, though.

 

[Mrtwooooo]

So my wife and I took a 10 day trip to Death Valley National Park and the end of September 2021. Spent about 6 months planning everything. Thankfully there is a ton of information online for just about every place we visited. I had every day planned out down to the routes we would take and somehow got all of the routes loaded onto my handheld Garmin GPS as well as offline maps saved to my phone. Since I knew there would be many times I wouldn't have cell service in Death Valley.
We left early Friday morning with our goal to get just outside of Dallas Texas to a campground on a lake for $10 a night. Saturday was more driving. We got to another campground just east of Gallup, NM. Sunday we went and visited the Hoover Dam. People at the Hoover Dam had to check just about everything I had loaded in my 80 before I could go park and check out the dam. After that we drove through Las Vegas and rode down the main strip to check things out. Sunday evening we arrived in Death Valley and stayed at Furnace Creek. The low that first evening was 85 degrees. By about 9am it was already 90 degrees.

We then spend Monday through Wednesday seeing all the things there were to see in Death Valley. Monday we hit a lot of the typical places like Bad Water Basin, Dante's Point, Artist's Pallate and Zabriski Point. Tuesday was seeing the Ryholite Ghost town and the cool/interesting art exhibit and also Titus Canyon. Titus Canyon was one of the highlights of the trip. I believe its about 26 miles on a gravel road. The further you go the better it gets until you really are in the canyon with steep canyon walls all around you.

Wednesday was by far our longest day. Left the campground at Stovepipe Wells and visited Ubehebe Crater. Had the place all to ourselves that morning. After the crater started the long day on gravel. We aired down to give us some relief. Passed by Teakettle Junction and made our way to Racetrack Playa. The playa was a very cool place. Walked out to the "Grand Stands" the vast dry lake bed. Then made our way to Lipincott Road. This was probably the most off road portion of the trip. We were going downhill so it made things slightly easier but still encountered a few jagged rocks that were an obstacle to deal with. After the pass was hours of driving on gravel. Since we left the Ubehebe Crater we had only encountered 3 other cars. Our goal from all of the driving was to make it to Gerro Gordo Ghost Town. Same place from the Youtube channel Ghost Town Living. Checked out the town and made our way to Alabama Hills to camp for the night.

Thursday was along long day. Left Alabama Hills around 4am and drove all the way across Death Valley, made our way to Las Vegas, stopped at the CVT Tent store to get a new mattress for the RRT ( The standard foam mattress was done after like 6 years). Continued up to ST. George Utah and started making our way to Whitmore Canyon. Its about 80 miles down gravel/dirt roads. The further you get along the road the rougher it gets. I had seen about half a dozen videos on youtube of people visiting Whitmore Canyon and we decided to make that stop a part of our trip. The view didn't disappoint and was worth the trek to get there.

After that was basically getting back home.

I had never done a trip like this before and neither had my wife. My main goal was I wanted to plan out everything as much as possible. I know some people say to just go without a plan and that may work for some people and some locations. I didn't want to have to think about where we were going and what we were seeing each day because we already had a plan. We actually didn't have any big changes to our plan/route the entire trip, so I count that as a big sucess to the planning. The planning also helped our families to keep track of where we were and where they expected us to be. I borrowed a Garmin InReach tracker to take along in case we were stuck/ broke down without cell service.

We cooked most of our meals out of the cruiser and stayed in the tent 8 of the 10 nights. Our biggest expense on the trip was fuel obviously. I believe we spend about $1600 while we were on our trip. About $1100 for fuel and the rest for food, camping fees, and a hotel room. This doesn't count all of the gear I bought for the trip.

I was super impressed how my 80 did the entire trip. My dad asked me if we had any issues during the trip. Only thing that happened to the cruiser was my main battery died. No clue what happened to it or why a 3 year old Odyssey battery just suddenly stopped working. The Aux battery picked up the slack till we got back to Vegas for a cheap replacement.


I've attached the Google Earth KMZ file that has all of our routes and places marked. Including gas stations and campgrounds. Almost all of the planning was done using Google Earth. After I had everything planned out in GE I saved each day as its own KMZ file and uploaded each of them to Garmin Explore. It took while to get everything saved exactly like I wanted it That way I could use my phone and handheld GPS to navigate.

Hopefully this info can be useful to someone who is thinking of making the trek out there.

 

[Mrtwooooo]

 

[Mrtwooooo]

 

[Mrtwooooo]

 

[bamabrock]

So my wife and I took a 10 day trip to Death Valley National Park and the end of September 2021. Spent about 6 months planning everything. Thankfully there is a ton of information online for just about every place we visited. I had every day planned out down to the routes we would take and somehow got all of the routes loaded onto my handheld Garmin GPS as well as offline maps saved to my phone. Since I knew there would be many times I wouldn't have cell service in Death Valley.
We left early Friday morning with our goal to get just outside of Dallas Texas to a campground on a lake for $10 a night. Saturday was more driving. We got to another campground just east of Gallup, NM. Sunday we went and visited the Hoover Dam. People at the Hoover Dam had to check just about everything I had loaded in my 80 before I could go park and check out the dam. After that we drove through Las Vegas and rode down the main strip to check things out. Sunday evening we arrived in Death Valley and stayed at Furnace Creek. The low that first evening was 85 degrees. By about 9am it was already 90 degrees.

We then spend Monday through Wednesday seeing all the things there were to see in Death Valley. Monday we hit a lot of the typical places like Bad Water Basin, Dante's Point, Artist's Pallate and Zabriski Point. Tuesday was seeing the Ryholite Ghost town and the cool/interesting art exhibit and also Titus Canyon. Titus Canyon was one of the highlights of the trip. I believe its about 26 miles on a gravel road. The further you go the better it gets until you really are in the canyon with steep canyon walls all around you.

Wednesday was by far our longest day. Left the campground at Stovepipe Wells and visited Ubehebe Crater. Had the place all to ourselves that morning. After the crater started the long day on gravel. We aired down to give us some relief. Passed by Teakettle Junction and made our way to Racetrack Playa. The playa was a very cool place. Walked out to the "Grand Stands" the vast dry lake bed. Then made our way to Lipincott Road. This was probably the most off road portion of the trip. We were going downhill so it made things slightly easier but still encountered a few jagged rocks that were an obstacle to deal with. After the pass was hours of driving on gravel. Since we left the Ubehebe Crater we had only encountered 3 other cars. Our goal from all of the driving was to make it to Gerro Gordo Ghost Town. Same place from the Youtube channel Ghost Town Living. Checked out the town and made our way to Alabama Hills to camp for the night.

Thursday was along long day. Left Alabama Hills around 4am and drove all the way across Death Valley, made our way to Las Vegas, stopped at the CVT Tent store to get a new mattress for the RRT ( The standard foam mattress was done after like 6 years). Continued up to ST. George Utah and started making our way to Whitmore Canyon. Its about 80 miles down gravel/dirt roads. The further you get along the road the rougher it gets. I had seen about half a dozen videos on youtube of people visiting Whitmore Canyon and we decided to make that stop a part of our trip. The view didn't disappoint and was worth the trek to get there.

After that was basically getting back home.

I had never done a trip like this before and neither had my wife. My main goal was I wanted to plan out everything as much as possible. I know some people say to just go without a plan and that may work for some people and some locations. I didn't want to have to think about where we were going and what we were seeing each day because we already had a plan. We actually didn't have any big changes to our plan/route the entire trip, so I count that as a big sucess to the planning. The planning also helped our families to keep track of where we were and where they expected us to be. I borrowed a Garmin InReach tracker to take along in case we were stuck/ broke down without cell service.

We cooked most of our meals out of the cruiser and stayed in the tent 8 of the 10 nights. Our biggest expense on the trip was fuel obviously. I believe we spend about $1600 while we were on our trip. About $1100 for fuel and the rest for food, camping fees, and a hotel room. This doesn't count all of the gear I bought for the trip.

I was super impressed how my 80 did the entire trip. My dad asked me if we had any issues during the trip. Only thing that happened to the cruiser was my main battery died. No clue what happened to it or why a 3 year old Odyssey battery just suddenly stopped working. The Aux battery picked up the slack till we got back to Vegas for a cheap replacement.


I've attached the Google Earth KMZ file that has all of our routes and places marked. Including gas stations and campgrounds. Almost all of the planning was done using Google Earth. After I had everything planned out in GE I saved each day as its own KMZ file and uploaded each of them to Garmin Explore. It took while to get everything saved exactly like I wanted it That way I could use my phone and handheld GPS to navigate.

Hopefully this info can be useful to someone who is thinking of making the trek out there.
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Awesome trip report! I loaded that KML in gaia to look at it later. Thanks!