USA ’22 – Day 6 – Road Ahead Closed!

DAY 11 – Yosemite to Death Valley Barstow (351 miles driven, 3.15 miles walked)

Today was due to be the second longest day of the trip in terms of distance covered. A total of 300 miles from Evergreen lodges, Yosemite to Death Valley. During this six hour trip the elevation changes from 9,000 ft to 0 and temperature from 4 degrees to 34.

We set off at 8am expecting to arrive 3ish including stops. It takes two hours of the journey time just crossing Yosemite which is a beautiful trip to make along the Tioga Pass.
The scenery changes rapidly from the slate grey granite of the soaring Yosemite mountains to the reddish peaks of the rest of the Serra Nevada. By the half way stage we had dropped 4,000ft and the temperature had risen to 20 degrees.

Not long after we had left Yosemite we left the road for a pit stop at Mammoth Lakes for food and fuel. In the past paying at the pump has always presented an issue with a UK credit card but fortunately not any longer. However, disaster almost struck when I took the green hose to fuel the car without thinking. Fortunately Helen was on the ball and stopped me. Turns out the green hose here is for diesel!

Before leaving the UK we had been watching the news on Death Valley closely as they’ve had unseasonably wet weather. In fact they had one years rain in a single day which caused the roads to be closed along with the hotel we were due to be staying in. However, it had all reopened before we were due to leave and it looked that while some roads were closed we could still get to the hotel. Google Maps concurred.

At a small town called Lone Pine was the turning to the CA190 into Death Valley at the head of which there was a large dot matrix sign saying the road was closed. Bugger.

We were left with a few choices: take a long route to the hotel avoiding the closure adding an extra 3-4 hours to the journey. Cancel the hotel and push on to Vegas and spend two nights there instead of one. It’s in situations like this that booking with a travel company is a godsend (hat tip America Road Trip Company). We called them up and within a few minutes they had cancelled the original hotel and booked another half way between Lone Pine and Las Vegas in a place called Barstow on Route 66.

By the time we were nearing Barstow our car clearly felt that we should have had enough by that point and displayed this message on the console. Given that we had switched drivers along the way I’m not sure what it’s problem was.

Tomorrow it’s a short and hopefully uneventful hop to Las Vegas.