Death Valley and Rhyolite Ghost Town 2026

 We are on the road again for another road trip.  This trip will be in the spring of 2026 traveling to areas that we normally never get to see because we are usually back at our home base in the Florida Keys this time of year.

We will be traveling from Hemet, California north towards South Dakota, and then east, weather permitting.  Our first stop will be at Pahrump, Nevada.

Pahrump is about an hour drive south west of Las Vegas and the drive there is across very remote desert. This was a very lonely highway with no cell service.

The scenery was beautiful in this area and is just south of Death Valley. When we arrived at Pahrump, we checked into our RV park.  It is a very nice RV park called Lakeside Casino RV resort and it is part of the Passport America travel club so our nightly rate was half price, $22 a night.

It makes the perfect location for a home base while making day trips to the surrounding sites.

This was a beautiful oasis in the middle of a harsh desert. The next day, we drove into Death Valley in our car for a day trip.  It is an amazing drive with spectacular colors in every direction.

Our first side trip after entering, the park was to drive through 20 mule team Canyon, which is where the 20 mule team borax trains used to travel. It was a very interesting drive with lots of different colors and shapes everywhere you look.

After exiting the canyon, our next stop was Zabriskie Point where, after a short hike, you have a spectacular view of the Bad Water area and a portion of Death Valley.  This was also where we got to try out our new selfie stick for the first time.  It turns out, there is a learning curve!

After leaving Zabriskie Point, we drove to the Furnace Creek area where we had a picnic lunch and then went to the visitor center.

After lunch, we continued to follow a loop road around a portion of Death Valley.  The next stop was at the old borax mill, where they processed the raw minerals extracted from the surrounding mountains into borax.

As we continued our driving around Death Valley, we came to very large sand dune area and there were people walking all over.  It was already quite hot and windy.  We just stood in the parking lot and watched because it didn't look like too much fun walking in that deep sand.

After stopping at the small store at Stovepipe Wells, we continued on our trip around Death Valley and the next stop was Bad Water, which is the lowest spot in North America!

Badwater basin forms the bottom of the valley in Death Valley, and after any winter rains evaporate, salt like residue is left, covering the shallow lake bottom.  We walked a short distance out onto the salt flat, but we left the real hiking to everyone else.

As we were heading back to our car in the parking lot, eagle eye Suzie, spotted a sign way up on the mountain side, describing where sea level was.

After a nice day in Death, Valley, we returned to our motorhome for a good night's rest.  

The next day, we headed out on another day trip, this time to Beatty, Nevada and the nearby ghost town of Rhyolite.

The first civilization we encountered, was a small store out in the middle of nowhere.

If you think the name says it, all, you would be mistaken. Besides being a gas station and truckstop, there was also a huge assortment of alien T-shirts inside the store, along with snacks and goodies for survival during the long trip across the desert. 

The store also hosted a very nice café in the back that doubles as a topless bar in the evenings and outback, was a purple building that served as a brothel with an alien theme. They said free tours were available, but we didn't get to go!

On the day that we made this trip, there was a high wind warning for our area that described a possibility of winds up to 60 mph.

When Suzie got out of the car, we discovered that the forecast was correct.

After leaving the store, we continued on through the town of Beatty, Nevada to Rhyolite.

The first building we encountered, as we drove into the ghost town was a bottle house.  It was an impressive building that took a huge amount of work to construct.

Another well preserved building was the train station.

There were several other ruins left of the town, but most of the buildings had either been moved to other locations or torn down and the salvaged materials used for construction at other locations.

After leaving Rhyolite, we made a quick stop at the Beatty Mining and Heritage Museum.

The museum was very interesting and had a huge assortment of artifacts from the old mining days.

After a really nice day, we returned to our RV park and got ready to continue our trip into Utah.

You may have noticed that there is a column on the right side of this Blog chapter that is an archive.  There you can find all of our past stories and you are welcome to browse them and/or share them with anyone you think they would inspire to GET OUT THERE.

We will keep you posted on our travels,

Tom & Suzie

Hangar 25, Big Spring, Texas, 2022

 As we continued our trip westbound, we spent the night in Big Spring, Texas.  After setting up camp, we checked our Roadside America App. and discovered there was an aviation museum close by at an abandoned U. S. Air Force base.

During World War II, the Army Air Corp needed a location where they could train bombardiers and they decided Big Spring was a good location for that.

They built a large airport here with all of the facilities to begin training.

They converted Beech 18 civilian transport airplanes into simulated bombers.

This is what an original Beech 18 looks like.

They cut off the nose of the original airplane and then installed a plexiglass nose that would simulate the size and shape of the nose of a bomber.

Then, before each flight, they would install a Norden bomb sight and begin training. 

The Norden bomb sight was a very top secret piece of sophisticated equipment.  It was an improvement over the standard bomb sites that existed before World War II.  The old bomb sites had an accuracy of about 40%-60%.  The Norden bomb site raised the accuracy to over 90%.

This giant leap in technology was very secret and for that reason, the training base had a very high security area where each night, all of the bomb sights were removed from the airplanes and locked into a large vault that was guarded around the clock.

Only certain technicians with Top Secret security clearances and the bombardiers that would use the sights were ever allowed to be within eyesight of the bomb sights.

Here, a bomb sight is being loaded into the nose of the aircraft under armed guard escort before a flight.

Many of the training flights were flown by WASP pilots.

After learning all about the Norden bomb sight from the Docent at the museum, we were turned loose to explore the rest of the small museum.

The first stop was an actual nose from a B-52 bomber, that you could actually climb into.

They say simulators can be just like the real thing.  Notice the death grip Suzie has on the control yoke as she simulates flying the B-52!

View of the pilot's seat and a fist full of throttles.

As big as this airplane is, it was still cramped in the cockpit and took a contortionist to climb into and out of the pilot and co-pilot seats.

The next stop was an A-10 cockpit simulator.  This was just the cockpit portion but here is what the whole airplane looks like.

They had a Cessna T-37 jet trainer on display.

Suzie's dad was a mechanical engineer and early in his career, he was part of the engineering team that developed the J-69-T-9 jet engine used on the T-37.

Here is a file photo of a T-37 flying with a T-38.  

Both aircraft were represented at this museum because after World War II, this training base was taken over by the newly established U.S. Air Force and designated as Webb Air Force Base.

This was a great find and we really enjoyed climbing on the simulators.

We are continuing westbound and if we stumble across any more interesting finds, we will share them with you,

Tom & Suzie