Brian and Nancy Morganti and I spent the first part of Sunday, March 14th, in and around Keeler and Cerro Gordo. After lunch in Lone Pine, it was high time to head for the dunes, dude! The Eureka Dunes! These dunes are in the Eureka Valley, by pure coincidence, I suspect. The Eureka Valley is not a valley — it’s a basin. “Eureka” means something to the effect of “I have found it”. So, the one who named this basin thought he had found a valley, and he got the name wrong. Fool. Or maybe I have the story wrong.
Nevertheless, it is a great basin. The Park Service strongly advises that visitors bring their old, useless Eureka vacuum cleaner to the basin’s main intersection — Death Valley Road and the side road to the dunes — and leave it there. A monument of sorts will be erected here. This will be called Vacuum Junction. Working together, we can make this junction more famous than Teakettle Junction, and create a better reason for the basin’s name.
We entered Eureka Valley via Big Pine on the west side. I was driving my X-terra, and a rear tire went flat on the gravel road in the middle of the basin. Brian and Nancy and I replaced it fairly quickly, and we continued on the side road to the dunes. The place was fairly empty, as usual, but we did see a few vehicles and a handful of folks on the dunes upon arrival. We spent an hour or two on the north and northwest sides of the dunes until sunset.
After sunset we changed outfits and switched from landscape photographers to astrophotographers. We enjoyed the dunes so much that we returned early the next morning. Given the high Last Chance mountains just east of the dunes, the sun doesn’t bathe the dunes until an hour or so after sunrise. I think that sunset at the dunes offers better light for photography compared to sunrise, but it was still nice to get a different “look”. A sandy and bumpy road allowed us to check out the eastern and southeastern sides the dunes.
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