An EPIC drive to Death Valley (Ash Meadows, Wild Burros, Rhyolite GHOST town, & Titus Canyon!)

Between the snow, the cat, and now these burros, this is one of the best days we've had in a while. Non-stop smiles. Hi guys. We're leaving California but just for the day and we're heading to Nevada. Yesterday we spent a full day at Joshua Tree National Park and over the next couple days we're driving to Death Valley National Park which is in California but we're taking a route that goes through Nevada to see some interesting places along the way. We did about three hours of the drive last night and we have two hours to go until our first stop. So we had no idea what we were going to be driving through and this place is ridiculously beautiful. Giant mountains surrounding, there's snow on the ground, there's snow on these mountains out here and it helps we had an awesome sunrise. This was, this is so unexpected and so awesome. We made it to Nevada and we were greeted by some unexpected snow and this giant cow. So this giant bovine who is named Alfie used to live on top of a brewery in Las Vegas but when it closed down the owner of the Longstreet Inn and Casino purchased her for $2,200 and brought her to live right outside of the Inn and Casino. That is so hard to say. Try to say that five times fast. The Longstreet Inn and Casino. The Longstreet Inn and Casino. Why is that so hard to say? All right our next stop is this really cool place called Ash Meadows Wildlife Reserve. The only problem is as you can see there's all this snow and to get to it the last few miles is, I mean it's maintained dirt road but it's a dirt road and going down that with precipitation could be tricky so I'm hoping we can make it but I don't know I guess we'll just have to go and find out. All right we were able to make it out here. The roads weren't too bad. What's really cool about this place is that it's the largest oasis in the desert and I came across this when researching stuff along our route towards Death Valley and just knew we had to come out here. It just seems so fascinating. This refuge is home to 27 endemic plants and animals which means they can be found nowhere else on earth and most importantly the devil's hole desert pupfish. It was the first species to ever be placed on the endangered species list and now today there's less than a hundred of them left here in the refuge and on this boardwalk here that we're walking by the visitor center you're surrounded by all these springs here that researchers believe is water that is coming up from the ground that's completing a 15,000 year journey. This is so clear and pretty and since we have the snow which by the way the snow is not very common here we talked to the person working here and she said that she's only seen snow I think she said three times in the last two years so it's really special to get to see this place in such a unique way but you can see all the steam on the spring right here because it's so cold out this is stunning. So I could go on and on about this place I was sitting in my chair the other day researching this and just found so many cool facts but to keep it brief and not turn this into a ash meadows wildlife refuge documentary I want to give you one more thing that I thought was very interesting and so fascinating and unfortunately we're not going to get to go to it because after talking to the ranger here and all the snow on the ground she said it probably is not advisable to drive over there but this place is the devil's hole and that's where the the pupfish that I mentioned earlier is but anyways they don't know how deep it is they've done many research dives you know to go down and see how deep it is but there's all these channels and and rooms down there and the deepest they've gone is 436 feet and they could see down another 150 but they never have found the bottom and the most fascinating thing about this is there was an earthquake I think in the early 2000s in Oaxaca Mexico which is 2,000 miles away and this earthquake caused a tsunami in the devil's hole like the water was rippling and stuff I just thought that was mind-blowing that could they be connected that is just crazy we just made it about an hour from ash meadows to the town of Beatty Nevada and we're being greeted by the welcome committee I don't know if you can see it's a wild burro so Beatty's located right on the border of California and Nevada and it's named after modelist Marie Beatty who was a civil war veteran and miner who bought land in the area and became its first postmaster it quickly became an important supply center for the nearby town of Riley and the entire bullfrog mining district which we'll tell you more about in a bit when Robert Montgomery a friend of Mr. Beatty started a mine in the area he needed a town to support it so he purchased some of Mr. Beatty's land and named the town after him over time Beatty's had to pivot from being a mining and railroad hub to an atomic bomb testing site to now tourism and since 1933 when Death Valley became a national monument it has been known as the gateway to Death Valley which felt like the perfect place to start our Death Valley adventure but before we explore the park we're going to explore this area a bit and since we've been driving all morning we're going to go grab some lunch at a cool looking local spot we came to a place called a happy burro chili and beer and as the name implies they serve chili and beer and they have fun hungry cats that'll hop right on the table with you it's a small little bar there they serve hot dogs hamburgers chili frito pie like what we got or you can get any combination of that on the inside they've got like all kinds of western kind of decor in there they have this outdoor seating that's really cool looking we cannot stop laughing this cat was the most unexpected surprise tasteful of surprises it's so cute though but he he or she i'm not not really sure really wants the chili oh my gosh this is so funny to me i can't stop laughing that's actually really good chili i wasn't sure what to expect in a really small town and i had heard it was pretty good but it has really good flavor the fritos are nice and crispy still this is the perfect lunch for a colder day with my new friend kitty cat really good it's got a really good spicy chili flavor in there and what i like the most is there's big hunks of meat in there it's super hearty i've named the cat chili and chili really likes my strings on my jacket we had to eat our chili really fast because as you saw our friend here was really trying to get at our chili but this place is called the happy burro because there's lots of wild burros in the area like the one that welcomed us as we came into town that's because back in the mining days burros were brought here because they could withstand the hot and cold temperatures they could go long periods of time without food and water and they were just the perfect animal to take between the mining camps and there's a bunch of wild ones because just over the years they were either released or they got away and they just kind of stuck around this area i guess and just like this wild cat has gravitated towards us we're hoping to go find some more wild burros this is made my whole day this is so funny well that didn't take long we found more of these burros we were trying to give them space and we were backing up but they just kept coming to us and they seem friendly between the snow the cat and now these burros this is one of the best days non-stop smiles hi guys i'm in heaven i'm in heaven donkey heaven donkey heaven you guys are so nice and so calm and so sweet and so fluffy and i love you i read that the population of them kind of get out of control and so some of them get rounded up and you can apparently adopt one of these burros so with we might be coming home we might be coming home with a cat and a burro yes kona would be so mad normally we would never approach a wild animal and recommend you do the same but these baity burros are a little bit of a different situation they're much more accustomed to being around humans and it's kind of a thing to do here but they are a wild animal so make sure you be careful just a bit southwest of baity is the ghost town of rhyolite back in 1904 two prospectors named shorty harris and el cross found extremely valuable high-grade gold ore in the surrounding area and a bunch of mining camps popped up in the area including rhyolite which later became known as the bullfrog mining district although there were many mining camps in nevada rhyolite stood out because the ore was of much higher value in the area boomed there were over 2 000 claims in a 30 mile area and over 5 000 people moved to the area within six months the town grew a lot over time with 50 saloons 35 gambling tables 19 lodging houses 16 restaurants several barbers a school and more however the town busted almost as quickly as it boomed while the area produced more than a million dollars within three short years which is about 27 million dollars today the ore began to diminish and combine that with the 1906 san francisco earthquake which interrupted rail service mines began to close and people started to leave by 1910 and by 1914 the power companies started to shut down power forcing those remaining to leave and by 1920 only 14 people still called rhyolite home we've been to quite a few ghost towns and mining towns and compared to some of those which have been more restored the buildings are just completely in ruins we saw a photo of what the town looked like and how many buildings were here before it's just wild to see what's left here now while most of the buildings in rhyolite are ruins there's one building that's very well preserved and that's tom kelly's bottle house this is a house that has glass bottles embedded into the mortar and tom kelly collected 50 000 bottles within six months to make this three bedroom house however he didn't want to live in it so he raffled off the house for five dollars a ticket and the house was won by the bennett family after rhyolite's decline the house was restored a bit by paramount pictures in 1925 for the movie the airmail and it still looks pretty dang good today besides the ghost town there's another cool thing to check out here in rhyolite the goldwell open air museum it began in 1984 with a ghostly creation of the last supper by belgian artist albert sikorsky there's now seven sculptures you can check out here for free any time of day we're gonna be checking them out really quickly because if you can't tell it is really windy and really cold and we are just kind of over being outside today tonight we're staying at a spot called spicer ranch which is just a bit north of baity it's a ranch that allows you to camp on their property for a donation they have hot showers which is key for us because we're trying to conserve our water while we're here in death valley and tomorrow we should be making a pretty cool drive into the park today we're driving into death valley national park but instead of taking the normal way into death valley from baity we are taking the tightest canyon road which is a 27 mile gravel road so we've driven many gravel roads in the van and they are never fun and we've been told many times and have read that it's a good idea to air your tires down but one we've never had a way to air them down or air them back up afterwards so the other day we bought a tire deflator and then an air compressor so we're gonna give this a shot today see if it feels any better see if we can get the tires aired back up we'll see we're airing down never done this before so i don't know learning experience huh we got this one done to about 35 three more tires to go all right we got it aired down moment of truth here here well i guess we'll find out here over the next couple minutes if it helped at all i don't know if i did it enough i did 40 psi in the back and 35 in the front where it's usually 70 and 50 so i don't know this feels way better so far if this is this is a game changer if this is real so a few important things to know about driving tightest canyon road it's recommended for high clearance vehicles only and four by four is not required unless it has rained and the road's really wet but we did call yesterday just to see if the snow in the area had impacted the road and they said we should be good it's also one way from the east except for the last three miles on the west so you have to enter it from the east and once you're in it you're in it and they say it takes about two to three hours to drive but knowing us that's going to take longer we're hoping for four just so we have time to explore more of the park today but we'll see so far the tightest canyon road has been pretty tame pretty flat but now you can see behind me we are getting some zigzaggy roads here going up and down more and then we can see off in the distance we think some pretty gnarly like switchbacks right there that we're going to be going up we were just down there we just climbed up this mountain this is reminding me of when we had the jeep in colorado and we're like off-roading and climbing up mountains it's something we never thought we would do in the van the only time we've ever done something similar is the mokey dugway in utah this is i don't know this is crazy it's crazy that we're doing this in the van right now it's a little scary because this part isn't that much wider than the van and it's kind of like the million dollar highway where there are no guard rails obviously but there's just drop-offs it's a little bumpy things are starting to fly around in the back the drawer opens it's just a pretty gnarly section of road here yeah the drop-offs the steepness it's bumpy and this is about as probably about as far as i want to push off push the off-road experience in the in the van oh don't mind me i'm just back here fixing the drawer because it's like jammed and now like the latch isn't working so it won't stay closed hallelujah we're out of the hairy section now and that was actually pretty fun i always get nervous you know taking the van on stuff like that but it was fun all right we're about halfway through the tightest canyon road and we made a stop to stretch our legs at leadfield it was a mining town that was founded on false advertising so a few hundred people came out here built up this little mining town and then literally a few months later it was found that there was not much to mine out here so everybody just left and now today there's just a few old buildings that you can check out and now we're getting into the actual tightest canyon of the tightest canyon road which should be one of the coolest parts of the road it looks like we're about to enter a slot canyon in the van these canyon walls are so tall and this part is very windy this is so cool we made it onto the two-way portion of the road which means we're almost done with tightest canyon and it means that we survived the hardest part definitely if you have the vehicle to handle tightest canyon road i say do it that was so much fun such a unique ride it's long but it is beautiful the entire way and just so much fun we got the tires aired back up and it only took about 10 minutes so it was super quick and now it's time for our death valley national park adventures to begin nevada right yeah adams says nevada i say nevada i think nevada's right but now he's getting in my head and i don't know if i'm saying it right ever it's a pretty cat or is it he or she just snotted on me