Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Death Valley, Towne Peak, and the Mystery of the SA-16 Albatross (Part 3)

The Summit
(GPS:N36 25.190 W117 19.095)

The next stretch was up one of the steeper parts of the hike to the actual summit.
We had to go up this thing.
Once on top of this it wasn't that difficult to get to the summit. We actually made pretty good time to get there. It took us about 2 hours 20 minutes. It was a minor victory as part of the whole hike. Like I mentioned in the previous entry, what was good was doing this early in the morning. The longer the hike would last, as far as the time we would be under the hot sun, the worse things would be. At the summit there was a slight breeze so we were feeling pretty good.
The above is looking to the southwest. Below, we are looking northeast.
It was nice to see Olancha Peak to the west which parallels the 395 highway below it.
Off in the distance we could see the snow capped Easter Sierra Range. Of course, we ended up staying at Lone Pine underneath all that off the 395; it is about 60 miles away.
I can't tell for sure, but I have highlighted two areas with dots below. The first one to the left I think is Mt. Langley. The second dot to the right is Mt. Whitney.
From the summit we could see our final destination again. We would have to continue to follow the ridgeline and descend to it.
In my next entry I shall show a few more shots from the summit before we continue on.

(Edit: I did this hike again in 2014. I took a video of it which can be found here: Hunting a Bird in Death Valley)