Lowest to Highest Day 0: Could This Be The Hardest Part?

October 12, 2022

Atlanta to Death Valley
L2H miles: 0
Flights missed: 1
Subs eaten: 2 each

The day was just beginning, but I was already exhausted. And it was no mystery why. In the hours that I was now calling ‘pre-day’, I had already managed to miss my flight, scramble frantically to find another, hold my bursting bladder until reaching cruising altitude, sprint through the Dallas airport to catch my connection, and develop a vicious little headache. By the time I landed in Las Vegas, I was a delirious husk, grateful to have made it with just a $400 hole in my pocket and only a couple hours late.

The decision to spend that extra cash was not made lightly, but it had happened so quickly that I wasn’t sure if the total had sunk in yet. And honestly, it felt like a drop in the bucket when compared with the repair estimate I was expecting to get from the Ford dealership after a routine job on Blackbird went bad at AAA. My guts were twisted and my mind was numb, but that could have been caused by so many things — hunger, sleep deprivation, dehydration. At least I didn’t piss myself at 10,000ft. If nothing else, paying for a flight, at the gate during the final boarding call, was a once in a lifetime experience, or so I hoped. As my brother said after we hugged at the curbside, it was something James Bond might do. Yeah, except he would have been wearing a tuxedo and wouldn’t have settled for a middle seat. 

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Arthur had been productive during the extra hours that my carelessness had gifted him. He’d already snatched my checked bag from the plane that I should have been on and picked up the rental car. All I had to do was breathe in the gloriously dry desert air then sit back in the comfortable passenger seat of our little gray Corolla.

Tired as I was, it was only 11:30am and there was a lot left to do if we were going to start our trek in Death Valley before dawn tomorrow. We needed to buy food for the hike, buy food for today, drive a bajillion miles, and cache water for ourselves at strategic locations along the route. Still, all that felt reassuringly straightforward compared with my morning drama. It was all going to work out. The intense flash-flooding that had washed-out part of the main highway through Death Valley twice during the summer wasn’t going to completely screw us over, right? Had the rare water sources that we would rely on to survive, themselves survived? There was only one way to find the answers to these questions.

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A couple hours later, Arthur and I were motoring out of the Vegas basin with a trunk full of food for the next week, 11 gallons of water to hide in the desert, a bucket of pumpkin-spice latte for me, and two Subway sandwiches each. I breathed deep, ready to finally calm my nerves on the two-hour drive to the ranger station at Furnace Creek. I twitched my eyes to absorb the barren desert beauty. The reds, browns, whites, and yellows. The distance. I’d been in the East for far too long, for 8-months since starting north from Springer on the AT. The Southwest had always been a home to me, but now I felt out of place — like I was visiting someone else’s crumpled memory of a loved landscape. Perhaps I’d become more absorbed by the Appalachians than I’d realized. This dry warmth was pleasant, but it felt strange rather than right. I thought about SpiceRack, how much she loved this place, and how strange it felt to be here without her. The outrageous hues of Red Rock’s cliffs disappeared as we wiggled into the folded brown hills on our way to the next basin.

The desert sped by as we ate our first sandwiches and made calls to loved ones. With Spice on the phone, we joked about an emerging pattern of events that costs me $400 every time I see Arthur. It felt good to laugh about it now, and to hear her voice, full of life and vigor during a good day of hiking in Virginia. At her warning, we didn’t stop in Parhump, and so were all too soon below sea level at the hottest place on earth.

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We checked in with Ranger Fudge (no joke) at the Furnace Creek Visitor Center, leaving our itinerary so that the authorities would know where to look for our bodies should something go awry. Unfortunately, they didn’t have much information for us other than that the roads we expected to be open were open. No one had been out to check on the springs since the flooding in September, so it was up to us to find out. When we left, it was a sobering 106°F outside, but we took heart in knowing that we planned to be at a significantly higher elevation by this time tomorrow. In many ways, it felt like the L2H was front-loaded with the biggest and most important questions. Would we beat the heat? Would there be water at the first spring? How would our bodies handle the heat, steep climbing, and off-trail navigation? If we failed, at least we would fail quickly.

After another hour in the Corolla, we parked on the side of the road to deposit our first cache of water. We wandered down the old gravel road that would eventually be our route with two gallons each until we were safely distant from the pavement. Arthur sharpied a note on each jug, “L2H Hiker Water. You take, we die!” Then we hid them at the base of a bush and piled rocks on top. Finally, I dropped a waypoint to mark the location in my GPS app. We might get here in the dark, and the bushes all looked the same. Raising my gaze to Telescope Peak 8,000ft above, it was sickening to imagine that we needed to make it here by the end of day two. What shape would we be in after scrambling up and over that ridge, mostly without trail? I felt nervous butterflies flutter in my belly. The L2H was intimidating in all the best ways.

An hour later, we were across the Panamint Valley and on the vast Darwin Plateau, bumping along Saline Valley Road to drop our largest water cache wherever the surface became too much for our rental to handle. The road was in surprisingly good shape, and we were thrilled to make it eight miles before we got tired of the slow going. Each tick on the odometer was one less that we would need to haul a huge load of water. Combined, they reduced this dry stretch — our longest — to a still-burly 40 miles, spread across three days and two nights. Dusk had faded to darkness by the time we stepped into the chilly air. By headlight and headlamp, we piled five gallons of water around an anonymous bush. Arthur wrote notes on each, and I dropped another waypoint.

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After hiding the final two gallons back at the start of Saline Valley Road, where our hiking route emerged from the trackless desert and joined the road, we retraced our route on Hwy 190 back to Death Valley. There was just one more task to complete before driving back into the park and calling it a night. On the way, we stopped in at the Panamint Springs Resort general store and dropped off a box of food to be collected later as we walked through on day 3. Again, it was challenging to imagine that we might actually make it here. The route was so unknown, and our worthiness untested. What will we have seen by the time we see this box again? How will we feel?

I was at the end of my tether and grateful for Arthur’s energy to drive us safely back to our campsite. The desert was dark and the road windy. It was difficult to judge speed and we strained our tired eyes for wild burrows around every turn. Finally, we backed into site 46 and quit traveling for the day.

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It was midnight by the time we had eaten our final subs and packed up for our early start. If the dark heat would allow, we’d be lucky to catch three hours of sleep before our alarms chimed us awake for the true beginning. The low for the night was 80°F, which was still several hours away, so I loosely draped my quilt over my legs after lying down. The stars were disturbingly bright overhead, and my brain disturbingly active. Whatever low-power mode had kept me going for 22 frantic hours was reluctant to switch off. My nervousness about tomorrow was probably to blame. Day 1 was arguably the most dangerous, harboring realistic potential for deathly heat if we didn’t move quickly enough before the sun turned Death Valley into a shimmering cauldron of lava-air. And if we found Hanaupah Spring obliterated by recent flooding, then we were screwed. However, it was good to have the brothers back together again, and although we didn’t have the best track record when it came to adventurous trips, I was confident that we had overthought every potential issue in true Eigenbrot fashion. If anyone could do this, it was us.

Arthur was nervous too, and doubted that he would get any sleep. I tried to put myself in his shoes. Aside from a new backpack, I was coming in with a confidence in myself and my kit honed by thousands of miles and hundreds of long days. Arthur, by contrast, despite being a freakishly strong nerd with plenty of backpacking experience, was new to the thru-hiking sub-genre and had never hiked a 20-mile day. I knew that he could do it, and I think that he did too, but he was digesting far more unknowns than I was. Besides, his brain was far smarter than mine, which probably made it harder to switch off.

Eventually, our mumbled conversation trailed off and a warm breeze lulled my eyes shut. My mind was finally ready to accept that the day was done and relinquish control. It had been a long, tough grind, but I took heart knowing that despite everything, we were on plan and on schedule. All we had to do next was hike, and we knew how to do that.