Cooper Canyon, Winston Peak, and Mt Waterman

Finally getting outside

Exploring around Mt Hillyer and Chilao

Fall Creek to Hidden Springs O&B

San Bernardino 9 Peaks Traverse Loop

tl;dr
The final "day" was a full 24h push to reach the end before my batteries (e.g., Garmin inReach, phone, headlamp, Garmin Fenix) ran out, because if they ran out, I lost my continuous GPX track of the route and I wouldn't have proof of having completed the full traverse.  After getting stuck on the salt flats on the wrong side of the seasonal Amargosa River, I got to the southern base of Badwater Basin by sunset.  After that, I followed the Amargosa River wash through moonlight for 10 miles until I could cross-country 10 miles to Saratoga Spring.  Due to oppressive fatigue that night, I started having visual, auditory, and olfactory hallucinations, and had to pause every few miles to lay on my back and prop up my lower legs and feet to mitigate the extreme pain I was feeling.  The sun rose by the time I reached Saratoga Springs, and between the terrain getting easier, having a lighter pack, and having daylight, I rallied to run the final 7 miles to the finish.  I finished ~10 minutes faster than my 96 hour goal, and all my devices ran out of batteries within an hour of finishing.  I am glad to be done and am still recovering almost a week later, confident that I never want to do that again.

The GPX track seen here has some wonkiness for miles 31-50, because that was the period when I turned off my Garmin Fenix watch to conserve battery.  The resulting GPX track I have uploaded combines what my Fenix recorded for the first 31 miles of the day, the last 7 miles of the day, and what my Garmin inReach recorded from miles 31-50 (slower cadence of recording, no pace information, no temperature information, etc.) when my Fenix was off and saving batteries.  I combined the different GPX files using the utilities at 

This was by far the hardest day of the whole effort, mostly due to the distance required to finish and the level of residual fatigue that I had built up over the previous few long days.  There wasn't really a way to make this day substantially shorter, because the next water source along the route after Eagle Borax Spring (near where I camped) wasn't until Saratoga Springs, about 47 miles to the southeast.  So unless I wanted a dry camp, I had to cover 47 miles in a day.  On the other hand, once I reach Saratoga Springs, I'm only 9 miles from the finish, so I might as well just keep going to the end, rather than camping another night.  But 56 miles in a single day is a big push over gnarly open desert terrain, especially when half of it will be done by moonlight.

I woke up at 7:30AM, wind still blowing and sun on my face.  I felt absolutely awful and not rested.  I felt like I wasn't going to be able to do the remaining effort at all, and I felt incredibly isolated up there looking down over Badwater Basin, not a person within about 10 miles.  I slowly gathered my things, ate my 1200 calories of oatmeal and olive oil, and chugged 2L of water for the coming day's effort.  After a last look at the snows topping Telescope Peak to my direct west,  I slowly descended the mile back to the valley floor and to my water source at Eagle Borax Spring, bleary eyed and fatigued.

After spending some time filtering and treating 7L of water for the last leg of the journey, I headed out on to the salt flats.  For a while, the terrain was pretty great!  But then I got caught up in the soft salty loose sand I call "soft marshmallow soil" and then some textured mud covered in white salt that I internally refer to as "frosted flakes."  Neither is very good for fast movement, but it didn't look like there was a good way around them, so I just trudged on through.

My goal for the day was to make a beeline for the Amargosa River wash.  The Amargosa River is a seasonal river that runs into Badwater Basin from the south.  Most of the year it's a dry river bed, but in the winter months after precipitation, you can find some water or mud in it.  I had been out there a couple of weeks ago, and I knew some of the sections of it were dry and made for good travel, much faster than the surrounding frosted flakes terrain.  So I was hoping to reach it after 20 miles of travel over the southern part of Badwater Basin.  And found it I did.  Unfortunately, it was still choked with water and mud, and it didn't make good travel at all, as I sunk into the swampy mud in its banks.  So I detoured around it to the East side and hoped for cleaner terrain.

It's hard to know what to expect out here on Badwater Basin, as it's constantly changing, and satellite maps aren't up to date with the current conditions.  Topo maps are no help, because everything is flat, and even if you *do* come out here beforehand to scout the route, it might have changed in the interim.  

I continued to the South but found I was stuck on the eastern side of the Amargosa River now, and the river continued to have water in it.  I was having to go farther out of my way because the river kept going East instead of letting me head to the South, which is where I needed to go.  Eventually I found a spot along the river where I could hop over it and not sink into the salty mud to get back on track.

Finally I found my section of dry Amargosa River bed at about mile 20 around when the sun began to set for the day.  I was confident I could stay on this course over the course of the night, even though the river bed winds a bit, it was still easier than cross country travel in the dark.  It was a day past full moon, which meant the moon wasn't going to rise for about an hour after sunset.  So I used that "dark time" to sit down and make dinner and rest my legs and feet.  

All of the rough terrain relies heavily on your feet and lower legs to deform to fit the shape of the underlying earth, and it can really take a toll.  My legs and feet (mostly my calves and feet) had been really hurting each day, but they were really bad at this point.  For an analogy, it was the same feeling that you get when you are outside on a cold day and your hands go numb from the cold, and then you get in the shower to warm them up again and there is about a 5-minute period of sheer agony as your hands regain feeling.  This agony was the feeling that I had in my feet and calves for the last 12 hours of my journey that day, pretty consistently.  It really hurt.  So I was happy to stop for a few minutes to massage them, lightly stretch them, and prop up my legs on top of my backpack to help with blood circulation through them.

As I was eating and massaging my legs/feet, I checked on my electronics and batteries.  I was using a garmin watch, a garmin inreach (for safety and to broadcast my breadcrumbs to people:  my phone, and my headlamp.  I also had a 10,000 mAh battery to recharge these items over the course of the trip.  But everything was nearly out of battery.  I tried to top everything up with my external battery but it ran out of juice as I lay there sitting in the dark.  At this point, I had a few hours charge left on my headlamp, 25% on my phone (which I needed to navigate to the finish), 24% on my garmin inreach, and 10% on my garmin watch.  I realized that my garmin inreach, the thing that was nominally recording my entire track of the death valley traverse, wasn't going to make it beyond about 11am the next day.  If it failed to record the entire route, then I would lack proof of having done the whole thing and couldn't claim the FKT, so in essence all my suffering would have been in vain!  I totally freaked out and turned off my garmin inreach, my phone, and my watch, to conserve battery as I rested there in the Amargosa River bed in the dark near the Ashford Mill Ruins.  

I realized that I didn't really have any other choice than to just keep pushing as fast as I could through the night to try to beat the inReach running out of batteries.  But I left my garmin watch off, so that if the inreach *did* fail near the end, I could turn on the garmin watch at that point to record the route with maybe an hour of so of battery left in it, and later stitch the two GPX files together.  So after about 45 minutes of resting and freaking out, the moon had risen and I needed to get moving again.

The next several hours until sunrise are a bit of a blur.  I continued on the Amargosa River wash as quickly and efficiently as I could manage.  Eventually my route took me out of the wash and across a large flat mud plain, with pretty easy walking.  The moon was high in the sky now so I had decent visibility, and I didn't have to rely at all on my headlamp, which was good since I had so little charge left.  I still had already done 30 miles for the day and was exhausted, but I still had a marathon to go!  Ugh.  I began making deals with myself, only thinking about the next "checkpoint" maybe 2-3 miles away and focusing on that short-term goal.  Then thinking about the next one, and so on.  

It was around this time that I began to hallucinate, presumably from the sleep deprivation and fatigue.  As an academic, I've had my share of sleep deprivation and am familiar with how it affects the body and mind.  But this was a new level for me.  I began to have visual hallucinations, just seeing things out of my peripheral vision that weren't really there.  A person off in the distance, a ghostly coyote running alongside me.  It's easy to block these out if you're expecting them.  It's like your brain's pattern recognition is turned way up, so you see patterns in things that clearly don't exist.  A bunch of rocks stacked upon each other next to a creosote bush all of a sudden looks like a small child in the moonlight, and that sort of thing.  What surprised me were the auditory and olfactory hallucinations that I experienced, which were new for me.  I smelled a strong smell of chlorine, to the point where I thought I had spilled my water purification drops consisting of chlorine dioxide, but it was just in my head. I would also hear sounds, sometimes someone shouting my name or a bird chirping.  Despite it being dead silent in the remote desert in the middle of the night, I could never actually hear silence.  Instead, I heard the recurring drone of a fictional leaf blower buzzing for hour after hour.  I don't know about you, but I hate the sound of a leafblower, but it was like there was a whole yard maintenance team going to work in my head.  This lasted for about 12 hours, and was really really irritating.  

Over this last marathon distance to the finish, I'd have to stop every few miles from exhaustion and foot/leg pain.  I'd lay down in the open desert, prop my legs up on top of my backpack and rest for ~15 minutes.  The moment I closed my eyes, I'd sort of instantly meta-dream, with moving images passing before me, but not actually sleeping because I was in too much pain and too exhausted.  After fifteen minutes or so, the cold and my sense of urgency to continue would bring me back to life and get me moving again.  I repeated this process a 3-4 times, until the sun finally started to rise as I approached Saratoga Springs, my final water stop for the trip.  Venus preceded the rise of the sun on the horizon, and it gave me a final wind to finish this darned traverse.  I got to Saratoga, drank my remaining water, filtered 1L of additional water, and set out for the final 9 miles feeling excited to finish and more alert with the Sun now up in the sky.

A little bit past Saratoga Springs, the nature of the terrain changed to a sort of consolidated decomposed granite, must more solid than the previous 100 miles of mud/sand/salt terrain.  It didn't give way beneath my feet like loose soil--I could actually push off on it.  Similarly, my pack weight was at an all time low since my food reserves were gone (I had eaten all 9 lbs of food and only had an instant mashed potatoes packet left), and so my entire pack weight was below 10 lbs at this point.  I jogged a couple of steps just to see how my legs felt, and suprisingly, they felt OK.  I looked at my watch and realized that I had about 8 miles to finish and if I ran, I could make my original 96 hour goal, and more importantly, not run out of battery on my inReach so I had a continuous GPX track all the way to the end (and therefore eligible for the FKT).  So I took off my puffy and windpants and set out for a run to the finish.  And I turned my watch back on to record this final effort to the finish.

Running felt great!  It was such a nice change from the previous days of trudging through soft sand and salt to be able to jog again, even if it was at only a 10 minute / mile pace.  But it was such a pleasure to run.  After a few miles, my left soleus began to hurt, as I think I'd angered it from overuse the previous few days, so I would back off a little and walk occasionally before jogging again over the solid terrain.  But overall, I was so happy to be moving again.  I held the pace until the finish, the Harry Wade Monument on the side of the highway.  I got there and was totally wiped out, having spent all my energy, my food, my water, and my battery power on this four day, 96h effort.  My inReach and my watch and my phone got through to the end with sufficient battery to continuously log my progress, but they all failed within the hour, so it's good that I had run when I did, or the whole FKT effort would have been null without proof of a continuous recorded track.  I laid down on the ground and propped my legs up against the monument to help circulate blood flow to my legs and feet and just rested.

I'm glad I succeeded but it was amongst the hardest things I've ever done.  The final night was pretty miserable, and I honestly didn't know if I'd succeed until I actually did.  After several days rest, I'm still exhausted and sore, but I think I may have dodged the worst of the problems.  I don't think I got injured, nor poisoned by the water or hydrogen sulfide gas.  And as far as I can tell thus far, I didn't get sick on the water this time.  Now I just have to figure out what the next challenge is going to be, but I need a break from Death Valley for a bit.

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Luke Skywalker

Death Valley Traverse FKT Day 4: 24h Continuous Effort to Finish

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