Woke up early today and cooked one of our favorite breakfasts, potato casserole! After breakfast we packed our lunch and headed to the Stove Pipe Wells airport to meet up with a group going on a 4x4 trip into Cottonwood canyon. Although we have 4x4 and high clearance our truck was too long to make it through some of the boulder fields so we decided to head up to Skidoo instead.

Skidoo is at an elevation of 5650 ft, the temperature dropped from a nice 72 at Stove Pipe to a cool 57 degrees.

We explored Skidoo for about 3 hours, there are many open mineshafts so you must watch your step! There were many remnants of population, old pottery, glass, tile, thousands of rusting tin cans and even a few old cars along with the many many mines.

We walked to the Mill which is being stabilized, however it looked like they had been working on the mill for many years as the park service signs were quite faded.

This Mill produced the largest amount of gold in Death Valley. This mill was also the only water powered mill in Death valley, they piped the water in from 22 miles away in the Panamint mountains.

On our whole adventure in Skidoo we only saw one other car and that was on our way in (thankfully at a wide sopt in the road!)

After exploring Skidoo we headed off to Aguereberry Point where we ate our lunch and enjoyed the spectacular view of Death Valley.

After lunch we headed further up Wildrose Road turning around at the springs where the road turned into a dirt road. The cottonwood trees there where showing their fall colors.

We headed back to Stove Pipe Wells in time to attend a talk by Marvin Jensen about the Jayhawkers of the original 49'ers of Death valley. Marvin is the gentilman that Bryan had been working with to locate the Arcan tablecloth. The cloth is now in the possesion of the Santa Cruz history museum an will be on public display in january!