This is the story of Greenshit 2010, my 24th Greenshit trip since 1983, and my 10th week-long trip to Death Valley. Greenshit trips are (usually) jeep camping and hiking trips into the desert southwest backcountry, off paved roads into isolated areas, at times of the year when we rarely see other people. (That is, late spring and summer when the temperatures over 100° are common.) Other Greenshit trips have been to Utah’s Canyonlands and the Mojave Preserve.

While we usualy start out with a vague itinerary, we try to be goal-free and enjoy whatever parts of the desert we happen to visit. We provision to be self-sufficient enough for 7 or more days, so that we could choose never to resupply. But in practice, especially in Death Valley, it’s hard to go anywhere that long without hitting a paved road, and we usually take that opportunity to find a store where we can at least restock the ice in our beer cooler.

Why “Greenshit”?

The Greenshit crew varies from 2-6 people in 1-3 jeeps. In the last 10 years, the core crew was me and my brother Joey, usually accompanied by others from a small select set of people we have vetted as suitable shitters.

This year we were accompanied by Joey’s brother-in-law Bobby (a 4-time shitter) and my son Danny (a 6-timer). We leisurely explored the backcountry around western Panamint Valley just west of Death Valley, and then ventured to eastern Death Valley for an exciting trip through the Funeral Mountains into Nevada. We drove two jeeps fully equipped for backcountry travel, my 1992 Wrangler and Joey’s Rubicon Unlimited.

This report has an annoying amount of trivia, including precise times to the minute for each activity. This is because I have taken to bringing a tiny dictation machine with me as my “logbook”, which records timestamps of each message. Combined with the precise track recored by my handheld GPS and timestamped photos, I know exactly where and when we did everything on the trip. This report actually started out as a transcription of that log, but I got carried away and turned it into a story, while unwilling to omit any boring details recorded in the log. However, I tried my best to make it a little more interesting than a transcript. Given there were no near death experiences on this trip, don’t expect a lot of nail-biting.

Navigating Hints

You can click on most photos to see an enlargement, and most of the links in the text show you photos. Drag the photo out of the way to keep it visible while still reading the text. Click anywhere to make it go away. The little icon after a link means it goes to an external web page and means it’s a movie. The earth icon means it’s a link to an annotated Google Earth screen shot.