Danny and Bobby were up by 6:00 a.m. and saw a burro near our camp. I awoke 10 minutes later to sunny and comfortable conditions. For breakfast we had bagels and lox with onion, cream cheese and tomato, although Bobby chose to remain sans lox. Since there were just 2 coffee drinkers, Joey purchased little packets of Starbucks instant coffee for him and me. These horrendously overpriced little tubes of coffee weren’t actually that bad (at least out in the desert), and it was absolutely wonderful not to have to clean the coffee grounds out of the pot each morning.

We finished breakfast just before 8:00 am. At 8:30 am we got out our first beers of the day and decided to take them on a short hike out to the end of the “point”, if there was one, overlooking Panamint Valley due east of the campsite. We walked about ¼ mile in 18 minutes, until we could go no further without rock climbing. From here we had even more sweeping views of Panamint Valley.

There were nice barrel cactuses here, and some of us used my Swiss army knife pliers to get toothpicks out of one. Removing a needle from one of these cactuses (another recurring theme of the trip) is amazingly difficult, but repeating this several times during the trip, we got better at it. I also found an isolated rock that looked very much like limestone with pockmarked formations, but nothing else around looked like limestone, so I figured it was a rock removed from the Modoc Mine somewhere nearby.

Morning Camp at Lookout Mountain

We sat around for a bit, probably with more beer, and by 11:10 am we started preparing for our day hike. Looking at the map and reading the book, I learned that we were not actually camped at Lookout City, but at a “suburb” a couple hundred feet higher than the city. The Digonnet book on western Death Valley referred to the great view from Lookout City, but it was hard to believe it could be any better than what we had here. The road to Lookout City actually forked off to the left from the road we had taken to get here—we never even noticed it on the way in due to our haste to get to a campsite on top. Also, most of the entrances to Modoc Mine were down in the direction of Lookout City on the slope to the north below us.

So we decided Lookout City and Modoc Mine were to be our destinations. They weren’t very far, but we wanted plenty of time to look around and I don’t think anyone felt super-ambitious today. To get to Lookout City we decided to walk straight down the hill from our campsite at a northwest angle, until we hit the road that we had missed. Soon after starting our descent we could see a snaking dirt road on our side of the slope, built up extensively on the downslope side with carefully placed rocks for most of its length. We were later to learn that was the road to the mine, past Lookout City.

We reached Lookout City in a half hour, at noon. It was perched on a broad ridge, with the northern end dropping abruptly into Stone Canyon, and smaller side canyons on the east and west. There were some sizable structures, huge rooms with full height stone walls, and some with wooden rafters and posts—more extensive than you typically see in these old mining villages. There was even a tourist sign posted by a “Lookout Historian”, describing a bit of the history.

The view to the northeast was indeed nice, but I think our campsite was better because we could see in multiple directions. There were numerous artifacts but we found no large machinery. After spending some time at the city we decided to continue up the road past Lookout City to the mines, which we could see around the bend across the side canyon to our west, approximately at our level. There appeared to be some gaping mine entrances over there, and we debated whether they were above or below the road.

At 12:50 pm, part way down the road, Bobby took off his hiking boot because something was irritating the bottom of his foot. He found a cactus needle that had penetrated his sole! It was ¾" long and it took three of us several tries to get it out with pliers. I never heard of a needle tough enough to go through the sole of a brand new hiking boot. Earlier Bobby was remarking about these shoes being a good deal because the store guaranteed he could return them if they failed. Was this to be considered a failure?

The road curved around the canyon, the downslope side supported by seriously built-up walls of rock. We came to a 12' deep pit adjacent to the road with a broken-down ladder, which I claimed I could chimney down, but nobody would believe me. But I didn’t choose to demonstrate without a belay. A minute further down the road we found a horizontal mine shaft on our right that was big enough to walk into, which went about 15'. If we had taken the turnoff to Lookout City when we first drove in yesterday, we probably could have made it this far, but I didn’t have proof of that because we couldn’t see the whole road back to the intersection.

At 12:58 pm, most of the way around the curve in the road, we encountered a large cave-in right in the road, which definitely would have stopped the jeeps. I remembered seeing this hole from above on our way down from the campsite. We walked the road a little further past this hole, and got to a flat area that appeared to be the end. We turned around at 1:05 pm to try and find one of those large mine entrances. At 1:30 pm, just after passing the hole in the road once again, we got to the areas we saw earlier from across the way. The one entrance that we could easily see from the road was clearly above us, so we took the easy climb a few feet up.

Most Death Valley mine entrances are small, so by comparison this one was huge. It was a square entrance 25' high and wide after the rubble pile at the beginning. Just inside, there’s an upper balcony easy to reach, 15' above the floor, from which we could see 75' into the passage using available light. The passage is about 30' high, and at the end of it wood was supporting some questionable ceiling, so we didn’t go down there. High up on the wall near the entrance, someone placed a beer bottle.

We explored for about 20 minutes, and at 2:05 pm we were out of the mine and walking back up the road. On the way, we stopped to catch the last tiny bit of shade along a wall. We returned by the same route we took getting here, first along the road to the Lookout City buildings and then scrambling up the slope toward our campsite. The hike back took only 25 minutes, and we were at camp by 2:30 pm. There we noticed that the tarp over the kitchen had partially blown off. The reason, apparently, was that the hook on one of the bungies became unhooked due to all the flapping in the wind.

Within about ½ hour we started to work on dinner, so we broke out the oysters while Joey made the margaritas, and we had our 2nd (and last) salad of the trip. Steaks, still frozen, were not thawed enough to put on the grill until 5:00 pm. Bobby brought a bottle of a special wine for this trip, and recited this in the dictation machine:

This is a special wine that I brought, Elyse Cabernet Sauvignon 2000. I shared the first bottle with 3 very good friends, one of which is no longer with us: his name is Tom. We had it on our last camping trip with him. We're going to savor the 2nd and only other bottle I have, tonight.

We had our steak (7.5 oz apiece), baked potatoes with butter (but we forgot the sour cream) and onions grilled in Wish-Bone Rubusto Italian salad dressing. It was luxurious but very filling, so we could do little but sit and digest for a while.

At 7:20 pm we started a night hike. There was what looked like a road, or maybe just a trail, descending north down the slope, directly from our campsite. It didn’t go very far (perhaps to some mine shafts), so in 15 minutes we were back to the campsite. Not much of a hike, so we decided to walk back down the road we came in on, to see the fork to Lookout City that we missed. We got there in 15 minutes, and then walked some short side spurs on either side of our road. By 8:15 pm we were back at camp to prepare for our nightly Laphroaig and chocolate. The moon was up, with a much bigger crescent than last night.

At this time it had been getting quite windy and promising to be a terrible, cold night, so we all put on warm clothes and wondered whether we would be able to withstand sleeping outside. But as we were sipping our Laphroaig, the wind died. We were probably in bed around 10:00 pm, windless.