Edna and Charlotte decide that they can’t drive into Death Valley – a more traditional, formal expedition will need to be mounted if they are going to reach their goal. So they go back home, back east, and wait for the hot desert summer to pass. In January, they return to Silver Lake and to their guide, the sheriff. The trio travel by railroad to Beatty, NV, where they rent a cart, a burro, and a horse, stock up on a month’s worth of supplies, and head west towards the valley.
Edna and Charlotte bum around Silver Lake, chasing mirages back and forth across the dry lake bed, then take a treacherous drive to Saratoga Springs with the town’s sheriff. They get tantalizingly close to their goal in Death Valley, walking when they can drive no further and learning firsthand how the heat, light, and distance of Death Valley gave the place its name.
Edna and Charlotte try to get their Death Valley trip underway but face plenty of obstacles. They visit the Imperial Valley and the Salton Sea and gain some healthy respect for the desert. Armed with new determination, they finally arrive on the doorstep of Death Valley in Silver Lake, CA. Will they finally find what they are looking for, or will they give up and head back home?
First, we talk about how this podcast is going to work. Then, Edna takes over and reveals why she and Charlotte decided to go to Death Valley for a lighthearted break from raising children and fighting for women’s rights in the 1920s. Why are two wealthy women from Cleveland so obsessed with going to Death Valley? Let’s find out!
A hundred years ago, it was considered by most to be foolish, absurd, unthinkable for two women to travel on their own, especially to an undeveloped place like Death Valley. A hundred years later, anyone who thinks that idea is foolish – well, they are the ones considered absurd now.
A hundred years ago, in the early 1920s, Edna Brush Perkins and Charlotte Hannahs Jordan, both in their early 40s, went to find the heart of the desert in Death Valley. A hundred years later, in the early 2020s, I, on the verge of 40, found the book Edna wrote about the experience, The White Heart of Mojave. As I devoured it, I wondered why it didn’t have a more prominent spot on the shelf of adventure classics. This is my attempt to make that book and these two women more widely known and to modernize this classic adventure narrative on the centennial of its publication.
Road Tripping in America is a podcast about life on the road, brought to you by two restless souls, Lisa and Paul, and our pickup truck with a camper, The Bobs.
If you daydream about long-term travel or overlanding or #vanlife – or maybe you’re already on your own adventure – join us as we share our stories from the road.
You can also read and see more on our blog, Driving Inertia, where we post photos from our journeys.
If there’s anything you’re curious about, you’re looking for roadlife advice, or you have suggestions for places we need to visit, we’d love to hear from you – email us at info(at)roadtrippinginamerica.com.
After five months on the road, we share a budget update, answer some unanswered questions from previous episodes, and find out what each other’s “ests” were (the bests, worsts, scariests).
In canyon country, we force our bodies through cracks in the ground in places like Buckskin Gulch and Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, send the Bobs down tough roads, and struggle with some big questions about land use. After 35 days of this, after enjoying endless canyons, gorgeous dispersed camping spots, carefully timed resupply runs, and achieving furnace temperature perfection, we finally feel like we have hit our stride with road life – just in time to pause for a few weeks.
After previous attempts were thwarted by Maruchan lunches, underpowered rental cars, unusual rainstorms, distracting flowers, flying tents, and snow, we finally managed to climb a big mountain. And why we’ll never stop returning to Death Valley, no matter what it throws at us.
We can’t live like every day is a vacation – we’d probably die (and we’d definitely blow through our savings). So most of our days on the road are like real life, with a vacation thrown in here and there. Back in more optimistic times, we had planned to spend my 40th birthday in Vegas. But then things went weird again. What was it like in Las Vegas in September, 2021? We’ll tell you what we saw.
Link to the wave speech from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
