Friday - March 6, 2015

Friday morning dawned bright and sunny as it had for the past three days. While we were eating breakfast and prepping for our ride, the rest of the group from Spokane/Colfax were packing up their trailers for the drive home.

Titus Canyon had been closed since Tuesday due to heavy rain. Our thoughts during the week was to try and go through it again, but Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday morning's reports all stated that the road was closed. It turns out that it was probably open by Thursday afternoon, but we didn't know that. We wanted to know that the road was open Friday morning, but word on road closures doesn't arrive until around 9-10am and we couldn't wait that long. So Dave and I left to check it out at about the same time the rest of the guys (minus the Seattle group) were heading out.

It was a beautiful cloudless day and the temperature started to climb as we did, heading east toward the Titus Canyon Road. We got there and it was open and no one was near us. Now that I had been riding on dirt roads all week, we pretty much flew down the road until we got to the up and down switchbacks. The road was a little soft from the rains earlier in the week, but didn't cause either of us any worries at all. When we got to Leadfield, we stopped to wander around the abandoned town, something I wanted to do Monday morning. There are several buildings and part of an abandoned car. Like elsewhere in Death Valley, you can see evidence of several old mines. The National Park Service has made sure that all are closed for safety but other than that has tried to leave things as they were.

After a bit, we headed down into the canyon. It being the second time for me I was curious to note that there are long open places in the canyon that I didn't notice the first time. We passed quite a few hikers coming up from the bottom of the canyon also. We stopped for pictures, and just generally had a great ride. I'm really glad we did this again.