I arrived in Death Valley to my new life.
“I live here now for the next seven months. I drove through some nice ‘middle of nowhere’ towns in the eastern Sierras to get here today. Lone Pine, Ridgecrest, these will be my towns. These valleys seem like secrets tucked away behind the Sierra Nevada. Hidden, all but lost from distant California, and the bewitched desert of Nevada is close. I wondered where this adventure would leave me- right here in this bizarre spot where I sit.
Panamint Springs Resort. It’s a small business, located remote within Death Valley National Park, not far from the parks western boundary. Its 44 miles from Lone Pine, the nearest town with services. It sits like an island at the edge of a vast sea of low elevation desert known as the Panamint Valley.
In the center of the isolated compound is the restaurant. It’s a historic old western building with a wraparound porch, a cactus garden out front, and two stately California palms. The motel is in back with fifteen rooms in a strip and a cramped parking lot. Behind the motel is a sort of junkyard where machinery and projects lay around. That’s where the diesel generator is housed which they use to create their power. At the far end of the property is a gas station/ general store with an excellent view looking over the desert. Across the highway, opposite the restaurant and motel, they have a beautifully landscaped campground.
Being so remote they must be completely self-sufficient. The water comes gravity fed through a pipe which runs along the rough rock mountains for five miles, bursting leaks and patched with tape. The pipe grabs the only water source, a spring in Darwin Canyon. They have a trailer park nestled into a grove of Tamarisk trees where the employees live, but my trailer is located way out in the campground. My trailer is exposed, out in the hard sunlight with an excellent view. They have a fire truck, a backhoe, and a small aircraft or two on their landing strip. A dusty sailboat lies among the junk. The place is classified as a ‘settlement’ making it one step below a town.”
Since then, Panamint Springs has become home to me and one of my favorite places of all. The American Desert is a place of hypnotic beauty and complete tranquility, but above all is a place of freedom.
