Run, Koper, run

As with every adventure, mine was also coming to an end. This was my last day in Death Valley and in the afternoon I'll have to start heading back, hopefully making it home around midnight, so that the following day I would be able to go to work. Corkscrew peak ( Workout details ) Butte peak that I climbed the previous evening. ... instead of the Corkscrew peak, which was left for today :). I go for my usual breakfast at Subway and then drive to the Hell's Gate. I have a bit of a dilemma there. Yesterday I climbed Butte peak instead of the Corkscrew peak. Today is my last day -- should I try to correct my mistake and mount the real Corkscrew peak? Or rather do the Wildrose peak as I was planning before? I settle for Corkscrew. I am wondering whether later on I'll be angry for having trusted a yodeling ranger :). I start going up but I don't see any trail, so I just head in the general direction of the peak. After a short running stretch I'm reduced to a ...

Getting up was tough. I did sleep somewhat better than the previous night, but was still tired in the morning and really didn't feel like getting out of bed. The breakfast situation didn't seem too promising and I didn't have time nor energy to look hard for anything else so I again ended up in Subway. By the amount of activity there I'm guessing it's possible it was the only place in town open for breakfast ;) Rhyolite After breakfast I hopped into the car and headed towards the ghost town of Rhyolite , which I decided to see before doing any running of the day. The town came to live around 1905 and within 15 years went from zero population to somewhere around 5,000 and back to zero again, owing mostly to the gold rush. Now it's just a ghost city and something of a tourist attraction. The ghost city of Rhyolite. While seeing the town I was also looking at the park map and planning ahead and I realized that if I stuck to my plan of running there was no w...

It wasn't a great night. For some reason, even though I was very tired after all the driving and it was 2:30am when I went to bed, it took me a long time to fall asleep. Then I was sleeping like a stone... until 7am when the noises from the outside woke me up. I was far too tired at that point to function properly so I stayed in bed until 10am, but hardly got any more proper sleep. It was time for breakfast. I could not find the breakfast place that I found on Yelp and it was already late so I ended up in Subway. The way the view that greeted me after leaving the hotel, my first peak at the surroundings at daylight, was not bad at all. Judge for yourself. The view from my motel room :) After breakfast I jumped in the car and went towards the park. My first stop was Hell's Gate where I took a couple of photos, paid the entrance fee and was on my way to the main Visitor's Center of Death Valley, at the Furnace Creek . So called Hell's gate and my gate to the Dea...

After reading all the stories about the Badwater ultra-marathon , supposedly the toughest footrace on earth , I knew that I wanted to go and see what all this Death Valley fuss is about. I also knew that I wanted to do it in winter or early spring as I wasn't quite ready to deal with the scorching summer heat; btw. one of the things that makes the Badwater race so tough is that it is in July when the temperatures reach 50 °C (120 °F). As I had no plans for this weekend it seemed like a good idea to do it now. Since I mentioned the temperatures it's worth noting that Death Valley holds the "most" distinction in many categories. To begin with it's officially the hottest place on earth -- in July 1913 a temperature of 57 °C (134 °F) was recorded there. The temperatures in the range of the aforementioned 50 °C (120 °F) are quite common in the summer. Secondly, it's the driest place in North America with the average rainfall of just 5cm (2 inches), a fraction of w...