Death Valley, with the popup trailer.
We took the popup trailer to Death Valley in November 2012 — Becke and I, camped at Panamint Springs, with a side trip out to the Racetrack.
The Racetrack is a dry lake bed in the northern part of the park, famous for rocks that appear to move on their own, leaving trails in the cracked mud. The access road is terrible. It destroyed the crankup mechanism on our trailer with dust and vibration. The lake surface is beautiful: perfectly flat, finely cracked, silent in a way that feels specific to places that don’t get many visitors.
We camped in cold that made sleep difficult. I woke repeatedly and eventually gave up.
The park does something that’s hard to get elsewhere — it’s big enough that you can be genuinely alone in it, and the emptiness isn’t uncomfortable once you settle into it. The sky at night over the Panamint Valley is not like sky anywhere else I’ve been.
The trailer was not the same after the Racetrack road.