Death Valley Day 1 – February 18, 2018

This was the first touring trip with Dexter, 2005 Harley-Davidson Ultra Classic.

I rode from Lake Elsinore, California, to Lone Pine, California, through Death Valley, visited the Ghost Town Rhyolite, Nevada and stayed in a hotel in Beatty, Nevada.

The ride North on US Highway 395 was quite windy.  The descent into Death Valley on CA Highway 190 was entertaining with a well-maintained twisty road and breathtaking views of the valley below from the mountains.

Rhyolite, Nevada

There are wild donkeys not far from Rhyolite on Nevada Highway 374.  The Ghost Town of Rhyolite was very interesting.  Hard to believe that this town’s population was about 5,000 people in 1908 and today there is almost nothing left.

Wikipedia has some good information about Rhyolite, Nevada here.

Vert near the ghost town Rhyolite, is the Goldwell Open Air Museum, an outdoor sculpture park.  Albert Szukalsi, a Belgian artist, created the site’s first sculptures in 1984, The Last Supper, consisting of ghostly life-sized forms arranged as in the painting The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci. Szukalski molded his shapes by draping plaster-soaked burlap over live models until the plaster dried enough to stand on its own. In the same year, using the same techniques, Szukalski also created Ghost Rider, a plaster figure preparing to mount a bicycle.