our windy weekend

Caleb and I spent this past weekend enjoying the expansive and varied beauty of Death Valley. Everything about our weekend was quite pleasant. The weather was warm, we got the last campsite available in the campground we wanted, we had plenty of time to see and do the things we wanted, and the local general store actually had hot coffee to buy. Everything was going well ....

And then the winds came. It didn't get real bad until Saturday afternoon, but then all it did was get blustier and blustier. It seemed the wind was waging war on all things stationary. Surely it could upend more than mere chairs! Fortunately for Hunkyness and myself, we found it mostly entertaining (until it was time to pack up and we had to unload everything from the tent that was previously holding it down). Sleep was a little more fitful than we'd planned on, as it was not uncommon to be awakened by the tent wall hitting our faces, or the thunderous noise of the tent being blown around as the wind made regular attempts to lift it right off the ground. The pictures below give a hint at the wind's fury. (More pictures to come.)

Here's Caleb trying to stake the tent to the ground. The ground proved unstakable though, so we had to use rocks, which turned out not to be very effective.

It was a little frustrating, to say the least, to try and anchor the tent as it spent as much energy trying to get away.

You might see now how sleep was sometimes ... hard to come by. Well, at least we know we bought a well-made tent. For all its bending and twisting, it held together all night long.

This tent was a few campsites down from us, and we couldn't stop laughing at how it looked like it was trying to take off! I just had to go and get a picture.

It might be hard to tell, but if you look just above the dry lake bed (which was formerly Owens Lake) you'll see white dust being blown off the ground. It was quite impressive to see up close ... not to mention the snow-capped Eastern Sierras for a backdrop.

We really do have more great pictures from our weekend ... but we just haven't had time to download everything and organize it yet. I promise we'll get to it soon!