Today we drove back into Death Valley, this time from the west. Rainbow Canyon is spread below one side of the walk out to the Father Crowley Vista Point.

From the point one can see the road we will follow going down to the Panamint Valley.

Then you have to climb through the Panamint Mountains to Death Valley. It had 8 and 9% grades.  When we were planning to move from the eastern side to the western, we asked a ranger iin Death Valley about driving through in our motorhome. He suggested (strongly) that we not. “It’s hard on your transmission, your brakes and your gas mileage.”  We did see a number of folks in RVs but only one as big as ours. After driving this in the car I was glad we had taken his advice. Below you can see the road that crosses the valley and climbs into the mountains that one has to traverse to get into Death Valley.

This last picture is just to show the amazing “fan-like” formations that suddenly rise from the valley floor. It really is difficult to describe how moment to moment this landscape changes.