PAMPERED PENGUIN: Adventures with the Palmer Sisters in Palmer Canyon

Adventures with the Palmer Sisters in Palmer Canyon of Death Valley

The Palmer Sisters Sue and Judy

The first time I laid eyes on Death Valley my first words were “What a desolate Hell Hole!” Over the years of visiting my wife’s sister, Judy, and extended stays in Death Valley I have fallen in love with it. Note it’s an affair that only seems attractive from about November to March. I’ve spent too much time at the bottom of desert river canyons during the summer to delude myself into thinking “well it’s a dry heat.” In the intervening years I have spent many days slogging up alluvial fans for miles to visit many of the canyons in the Valley with my wife Sue.

This year I was pouring over the map looking for places that we haven’t been before and found Palmer Canyon. It’s located between Red Wall Canyon and Fall Canyon. It also looked like you could avoid the long tedious hike up the seemingly unending ramp of the fan. Just pull into the Titus Canyon parking lot and head north and contoured over to the mouth in a couple of miles and avoid most of that elevation gain and save about a mile or so of hiking. Strangely my wife Sue did not seem to share my enthusiasm to go hike a canyon that shared her surname. So I pointed out the apparent fact that we could just follow the contour and it would just be a cake walk. I got the “Look”. Of course I broached the subject on the drive back from our hike in to Red Wall Canyon, a nice 8 mile round trip stroll. As the days passed the idea seemed to appeal to her more and she decided she wanted to share the hike with her sister Judy.

Judy is a veteran DEVA hiker who seems to always to have a 40 lb pack on her back any time she puts her boots on. Judy gave an enthusiastic “Okay, I’ll drive over from Shoshone and get there about 0630 or 0700.” To which her loving sister replied “What!!!! The earliest I can get up is 0700 and it will take me an hour and a half to wake up.” My position was a neutral “Whatever” and I let the sisters negotiate a departure time.

The days of the hike arrived: cool, clear, no wind and not even a vague hint of rain. Our packs were loaded the night before, our approximate route was plugged into the GPS, our water bottles were filled, and our lunches were packed. After shoveling out room in the back seat of our ancient abused Subaru for packs and people off we went, congratulating ourselves on our semi early alpine 0930 start.

We arrived at the Titus Canyon trail head about an hour later. Sue and I pulled out our oversize butt packs and Judy pulled out her pet rock she calls her pack and off we went, hydrated and sun screened. “We’ll be there in not time. It’s only about a 1.75 miles and it only looks like we’ll have to gain a couple of hundred feet of elevation according to my GPS.” I remarked smugly.

The trail starts out from the parking lot towards Fall Canyon and is well marked, well trampled, and very obvious. After about a mile we came to our first waypoint that I had carefully selected on Google Earth. Amazingly enough it seemed to be pretty much right on track across Fall Canyon wash on a faint trail that lead to a better defined path that climbed out of the wash on the north side. We continued to follow the contour up to a bench and over towards the area Steve Hall called the “Caldron”. The Caldron is an erosional feature of multi hued convoluted rock formations that you have to descend into and hike around. I found that my way points in the GPS were more of guidelines that actual destinations. So we just walked along the bench following a disappearing small trail and occasional cairns until we found an arroyo that looked like it would go and dropped into it. We ended up in a very nice little short slot canyon through yellow soft rock that lead past the arch that’s in Steve Hall’s description of this hike. (http://www.panamintcity.com/grapevine/palmercanyon.html ).

Sue in the arch The “Caldron” late in the day

From here we continued down the canyon till it opened up into a more typical DEVA wash and found some cairns leading up a draw that lead to a faint trail that ascended around the northern edge of the “Caldron.” The “Caldron” is one of the places in the Valley where light has myriad of colors, shapes, an aspect to paint an ever changing image. It would have been a great hike if we just stopped here and watched the play of light for the rest of the day. But it was not to be so we watched the light play on the Caldron as we continued our traverse up and around to the mouth of Palmer Canyon.

Palmer Wash

At about 3 miles, we arrived at Palmer Canyon Wash. So much for the 1.75 my waypoints said it was. Apparently we failed walk in a straight line. We were greeted with a wide expanse of finely sorted gravel arranged by size, shape, and color that appears to end at an impenetrable wall of solid rock. As we continued up the wash it became more apparent that there was indeed a canyon that penetrated these imposing buttresses through a crack that lead to the first narrows.

I have pretty much squandered most of my life hurling myself down obscure river canyons in North, Central, and South America in pointy little boats and I’m well acquainted with the power of water. I’ve seen boulders the size of houses tossed around by floods with as much effort as a kitten batting a feather around. The erosional features that we see everyday are not caused by the patient work of rain and wind working gently to carve these shapes. They are caused by raging torrents of water being unleashed across the land that transports everything in its path and carving out channels through solid rock with little or no effort repeated century after century deepening, widening and polishing. As we walked up this canyon I was awestruck by the evidence of this power in an environment as dry as DEVA. The sinuous twist and turns of the narrow well polished walls of the canyon revealed an amazing array of detail and the fine texture of the bones of the mountains as the walls extended high above us.

Judy in one of the Narrows of Palmer Canyon

There are two narrows section of Palmer Canyon with some mild scrambling involved in getting up and down. Both sections have an ever ascending bed of loose gravel and the continual crunch of sole interfacing with the gravel seems to fill the canyon with this sound. If you stop and listen you get to hear the exquisite sound of the desert in January, nothing; Silence. The Silence is so complete that you can’t even hear the sound of the wind. No intrusions of cars, jets, helicopters, music, voices, or animals. At this time and place you find only the noise of your body, the pounding of your heart and the gurgle of that last slug of water you just had coursing through your system. Wait what’s that noise? Crunch, crunch, then the gentle sound of water splashing on gravel, a giggle, a loud snicker, then a laughing voice exclaiming “Look Palmer Spring” and a chorus of laughing sisters. Life is once again running in greased grooves. We continued on past the second narrows for about a mile where the canyon opened up and offered grand vistas of the mountains beyond. Displaying their undulating and tortured geology unimpeded by all the pesky vegetation that prevents you from seeing the bones of the planet.

View from the canyon at the top of second narrows

We decided to have lunch here and Sue declared that she wanted to go up and get a closer look at that peak. It was late afternoon and Judy pulled out the maps from her rock and a quick look determined that it was still about 7-10 miles off and a lot of up. We’d already come about 4 miles from the car and gained about 2500 feet, so that plan was put on hold. We never made it up to the 80 foot dry falls but on the way back we kept coming across interesting features, colors and shapes. The hike down the rim of the Caldron in the late afternoon light was spectacular and we didn’t get too lost on the way back to the car and arrived just in time for a spectacular sunset. All in all it was a great day, great hike, and a fantastic canyon.