Christmas in the desert 2017 – 2: Tin Mountain, Death Valley

Continued from here…

In Death Valley our goal was to climb Tin Mountain. We arrived at Furnace Creek only to find the campground full (not really a surprise, that campground is almost always full on weekends). We studied our maps and decided to just continue to the starting point of our hike along Racetrack Road. Around 8 pm we found a road side camp spot and setup camp. It was quite cold and unpleasant and after a quick hot meal we called it a day.

Saturday morning we got up with the sun and prepared for our hike. After negotiating the gentle slope of alluvial fan below the mountain we reached a ridge that would lead us up to 8000ft. Here we also found a nice use trail to follow. Once at 8000ft there was no more obvious route in the rocky terrain and we picked a ridge leading in the right direction. We arrived on the peak at about 3pm which meant that about half of our descent would occur in the dark. We had a nice break taking pictures and refueling. The views from up there were spectacular with Death Valley to our east/south and the Sierra Nevada to our west. On the way down we followed a slightly different route for the top portion of the hike by skirting the rocky ridge arriving at the use trail via easier terrain. The last couple of hours of hiking required head lamps. We got back to the truck about 10h after we started. Tired and cold we again had a quick hot meal and crawled into our bags at our roadside camp.