The first stop on this trip to Pahrump was Silurian Dry Lake, about 25 miles or so north of Baker, CA. It was windy, to say the least. We had footraces with and against the wind. Running into the wind felt like running in a pool and sticking your head out of a car window at the same time, while sprinting downwind felt sublimely quiet and the closest to freeway speeds I've ever approached on foot. I loved every second of it.
Objects in windshield are much further than they appear... Lake beds at night have a way of messing with scale. You can drive at 20 miles an hour and it feels the same at 80, or vice versa. Much of what we discovered about dry lake beds this weekend boggles the mind. Whether by their age, size, or their sheer silence at two in the afternoon. -- We also discovered they generally aren't very easy to get to. This video shows Mark and I trying to get my car as close as we dared to the Stewart Valley Dry Lake. I ended up parking it here, after scraping my rocker panels on a few rocks, and bouncing my exhaust off a few bushes.
Just look at that ground clearance! 4.25 inches of off-roading goodness! Why did I drive my car into the wastelands, you ask? I'll tell you...for meteorites! Yes, we were on our very first meteorite search. Meteorite searching generally involves finding the most god-forsaken life-inhibiting piece of desert you can imagine. The odds are stacked against you, but hey, at $25 a gram, it just might be worth it. So, here's the odds. One meteorite falls per square mile per thousand years. You have a chance of finding that meteorite IF you happen to walk directly to it, IF it falls in a place where plants or water or leaves won't bury it, IF no one has looked there before, IF it didn't rust into a million pieces and disappear, and IF you don't mistake it for another ordinary rock. The one thing you have in your favor is that most meteorites are ferritic and stick to magnets. It's pretty easy, really. All you do is find a good place to look, and then locate the dime-sized piece of metal that God dropped somewhere in several square million miles of desert. How hard could it be?
They're out there, I know it! Quick, Mark! Not a moment to lose! I'll take the three square miles on the right, and you take the three square miles on the left!
And yes, I drove my car into the wilderness and walked 3.5 miles for that. I'm still pretty sure it was worth it...I think. The lake bed is an amazing, other-worldly place, though. It's so quiet, you can hear passenger jets flying by when they are up at cruising altitude. Mark and I spoke to each other with normal indoor voices across nearly a hundred yards.
I hear that there are more than 200 large dry lakes in the Southwest. The one we walked around on is about 6 square miles. I figure that during our 2.5 hour search, we covered about 0.5% of its total area. That means, well, that means there's A LOT more looking to do. But rather than ponder these odious numbers, we returned to Pahrump. Once there, we accomplished a few firsts. There was my first on-set experience for a movie (where I hope my gravel crunching didn't ruin the shot), and my first party with minor celebrities. Sadly, I don't have photographic proof of either of these. What I DO have photographic proof of, is this...
...our trip to Red Rock Conservation Area. I also have a picture of my wife with Joshua Tree unmentionables in her mouth. I find it rather amusing.
On a more serious note, this place merits further exploration. It might be a little too close to Vegas for comfort, but it does have redeeming features such as exceedingly deep and narrow canyons...
...and garishly red sandstone rockpiles worthy of the Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote.
Maybe I'll get there next weekend... :-) But now, I'm going to bed. Later, folks!
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