When I left off in Part One and Part Two, we’d just completed Usal Road and arrived back at pavement at Four Corners. From there we drove north on Chemise Mountain Road, which was much like a (mostly) paved version of Usal Road. Before long we reached Shelter Cove Road and began the big downhill […]

The Lost Coast The Lost Coast really came to my attention when we went on our first group offroading trips back in 2002. I’d heard the term before, and knew from a previous road trip up the California and Oregon coasts that it was an area where the highways went inland, strangely bypassing the far-western […]

As five or six thousand pounds of Land Cruiser hurtled backwards down the steep trail towards the abyss – with me strapped into it – I pushed on the brakes as hard as I could and hoped it would stop sliding. The loose soil was the deciding factor now, and the knobby BFG Mud Terrain […]

The western border of Death Valley National Park is not, it turns out, even in Death Valley. It’s in Panamint Valley, which is basically the next valley to the west of Death Valley. It was there that we reached the large Welcome to Death Valley monument/sign and stopped for a touristy photo op. From there […]