Panamint City & Sentinel Peak via Surprise Canyon

Panamint City is an old mining ghost town on the western edge of Death Valley accessible only by a fairly rough 7.5 mile hike and fairly well preserved as these things go.  In addition to several mines to explore there are a number of cabins that are maintained by visitors and year round water sources make it an attractive location for a backpack.

It's also possible to do two Desert Peak Section peaks from there which is why I'd come back in 2012 for a three day.  After making the long uninteresting slog down the ridge and back to Porter I always said I wanted to come back but that I'd only do Sentinel.

And as it happened fellow WTC staffer Gracia Plascencia was leading it this year as a combination Sierra Club I provisional and WTC Experience trip over Easter weekend.
The drive is only 4 about 4 from Orange County so as usual we left after work Friday.  And found something disturbing...


That's the 91 at 7:30 pm.  We were moving along at 70 mph instead of crawling forward in a sea of red lights.  Spooky!  Now I wish it was Easter every weekend.

The trailhead for surprise canyon is accessed off the 178 north of Trona.  Once you turn off the highway there are passenger car accessible dirt roads that take you through Ballarat and up to Chris Wicht Camp.

Interestingly enough the area around Ballarat was packed.  Later we'd find out this was a group called Wilderness Torah that does a burning man type religious gathering every year.


We spent the night at the ruins of Chris Wicht Camp which is as far up as you can drive into Surprise Canyon.  It's named after an old superintendent of the Campbird Mine who lived here in the 1920s and more recently was occupied by Rocky and George Novak until 2006 when they were burning brush and the entire thing went up in flames.  Prior to that it was apparently quite the lush oasis of Cottonwood Trees.


It's been cleaned up over the years but it's pretty barren and aside from a few interesting ruins there are no facilities and precious few places to find some privacy.  Plenty of space to camp though.


This being her Sierra Club I Provisional Gracia gave a rousing trailhead talk while exposing LNT, general safety, and kindly asking people not to get hurt.

We had two WTC students from San Gabriel who didn't show up at the trailhead the night before and we couldn't find any sign of them that morning.  We waited about half an hour past our trail time and even drove down the road to look for them before reluctantly deciding we had to leave them.  Fortunately it turned out they had just had a little confusion about the trailhead and had stayed down the hill with the jewish group and caught up with us a few miles in.


As recently as 1984 there was a graded road leading up the canyon but that was washed away by the latest in a series of flash floods.  In addition to ending mining operations it actually stripped one early section of the canyon down to bedrock creating a series of waterfalls.





After the road was washed away Jeeps used to drive the canyon until it was closed to anything but foot traffic in 2002.  You can still see holes in the rock where they suck in steel bars and winched the jeeps up past the falls.

This site has some pictures and you can find videos like the one below.


Entertainingly the guide book for the area written by Digonnet relates how Novak once got fed up with all the Jeep traffic and smeared crisco over the rocks to make it impassible to the constant jeep traffic.  And got two months in jail for his trouble.

These days it's a rather pleasant hiking experience and there are generally solid routes if you just give up and walk in the stream.  So water shoes are recommended.


Once you exit the white rock section the trail gets easier though there is a fair amount of route finding and experimentation to figure out which routes go through and which ones dead end in dense vegetation or loose rocks.




Leading to descents like this...


My suggestion would be don't stray too far from the bottom of the canyon.  There's generally something down there that goes and also expect to be walking up a flowing stream at a few points


Eventually it opened up and we could see Panamint City off in the distance.  It took us about 5 hours from trailhead to here.

Sourdough Canyon is a left hand turn right before you reach Panamint City proper.  A short distance up is The Castle.  I stayed here last time after learning about it from some folks I met on the way in and it's far nicer camping than where most people go next to the Panamint Hilton cabin.


Unfortunately for us it was already occupied (though they weren't currently there) so we just took a break and explored a bit before continuing on to Panamint.



The Castle is an impressive setup with plenty of shade and even running water right on the porch assuming the surprisingly long series of pipes which lead up the hill to the spring are repaired.
While most of the group rested for a bit a few of us hiked uphill to see the spring.


The pipes leading back to the cabin have been repaired and replaced multiples times so if you get there and there's no water flowing I'd recommend taking a hike up the hill and seeing if there was something easy you can fix.



We came back to a rather relaxed looking group and decided it was time to get moving.


There's a trail that leads from the port of The Castle down past some other cabins and into Panamint City proper.


The cabins on the hill are not nearly as well maintained as The Castle or the Panamint Hilton (visible on the right side of the picture above) but there is some decent camping up there for smaller groups as long as you don't mind getting water from either The Castle or the Hilton.

Looking back up at the cabins from near the Hilton

We could see someone down by the Hilton cabin and sure enough it was occupied.  The guys name was Brian and he happened to be the same person who had given our missing group members a ride up the hill when they realized the large group around Ballarat wasn't us.  He was out visiting the area from Ohio and planning to stay for several days.

He was nice enough to offer to let us use the cabin since we were a large group but we had no interest in sleeping inside.  While most of the hantavirus warning posters seemed to have been removed this time personally I'd prefer not to sleep in structures known to have a lot of rodent droppings.


Someone had cleaned up the bathroom since I'd been there last and it looked like the toilet might actually function.  We didn't test it.




When I was there last time the water pumps outside the Hilton were working but this time they came up dry.  There was a slow drip coming out the kitchen faucet but considering our group size we decided to try our luck up the hill in Water Canyon since the camping options around the Hilton were rather exposed.


Thompson Camp is located a short distance up Water Canyon and is named after a couple who lived there in the 1930s.


The cabin is in shambles but the water was flowing stronger here than anything else we saw the entire weekend allowing us to filter and set up for the following day.


We camped just below the cabin where there's a large area and a few fire pits.  We had to search around a bit for suitable tent sites for everyone but we managed.


Also interesting is there's an old Chevrolet sedan obviously from the period where a graded road still existed.


Not long after we arrived two other guys showed up and headed further up the canyon to camp.  Still this was more private than any of the options down below.

Nighttime around our candle and LED campfire

Gracia had us up at 5 am and planning to leave camp at 6:30 am.


On the way back down to Panamint we ran into a small herd of donkeys who watched us disinterestedly from up the hill.

After stashing our camping gear near the Hilton and started up the old road to the Wyoming Mine.



There are two major mine adits along the road and they're interesting to explore.  While we didn't go into them this time I went to the back of both previously.  One goes back for a good 15 minutes of brisk walking while the nearly collapsed entrance at the top has a still functional mine cart you can ride assuming you don't mind crawling in carefully.


At the top of the road there's a trail leading up and to the south.  Some maps show it connecting over to the Hemlock Mine at the top of Marvel Canyon but we soon left it for the ridge.



Near the top we even had a short section of snow.



The peak in the background is Porter.  While you can downclimb from Sentinel and grab it the route and the summit are pretty dull.  I'm planning to head back and grab it from Happy or Pleasant canyon at some point since now I need it for my second time around the DPS list.

Telescope Peak from the summit of Sentinel

Coming down we tried to pick up the connector trail leading to Hemlock Mine and ran into our friend Brian right at the point where we found our way blocked by a rather deep chasm.  You can bypass it by climbing up the hill a bit.


Beck in town we grabbed our gear and Brian was nice enough to take our picture in front of the Panamint Hilton cabin.


We didn't have time to visit the main processing facility up the hill but it's well worth looking through.  It's the most modern of the structures remaining.


Hiking out we avoided getting up on the hillside and so spent a little more time walking through water.



As we reached the falls we passed a scruffy looking couple on their way up claiming they were looking for the waterfall and pool.  They asked us how close they were and when said we were pretty sure they'd passed them all already they got a little rude and took off.

Not long after Gracia and I were in the front when we heard a loud squawk.  I squawked back wanting to be friendly and saw some not quite clothed folks peaking at us over the rocks.  We then met two nice ladies who had come up the canyon with the other two and decided to wait below and swim.


Seeing as it was getting rather close to dark they tagged along with us on the way down past the last few waterfalls.


Once we were down we hung out at the cars and rehydrated ourselves on the beer we'd stashed before the trip.  After a while it was dark and the ladies who had come down with us still had no sign of their friends (who were also their ride back to camp) so Gracia drove them down while we waited.  The missing folks still hadn't arrived when she got back.  We talked to someone at the camp below who assured us they had everything handled and I later verified the folks did make it out.


Craving real food but with limited options considering we left the trailhead after 8:30 pm most of us ended up at the Adelanto Denny's at 11:30 Sunday night.  Granted if there's ever a time when Denny's would sound appealing it's probably after backpacking for a few days.