Death Valley Deep Dive 2024

[Beardilocks]

I had seen one photo of this strange rock many years ago and have been searching for it since.  Last year I found one other pic that showed a bit more background and was able to do some Google earth magic (with some help from Brice) to narrow down the location. 

I still managed to end up walking a full mile in circles looking for it.  Lol. 

I can only imagine that this was someone's inside joke.  And it must have been a powerful one for the amount of time and effort it must have taken to carve out.  Very strange.

If anyone ever stumbles across info on it LET ME KNOW!

The rock was smaller than I expected.  Which was part of my problem in the search.





It reads “Well This Looks Like The Stockyard”.  The spacing is horrible…  haha.  The “RD” at the bottom is the end of “Stockyard”. 


What a strange thing to say.  And the not most economical way to get the point across, with how time consuming it must have been to chip out. 


The wash right in front of the rock looked like a terrible place for a stockyard of any kind. But in an area about 500-1000ft to the south (rock stage left) there was some debris and signs of activity near an old disused road. 

A can dump of course.


A couple of deeply imbedded but broken off railroad-tie sized posts.


More posts.





More modern can than the posts.


Pull-tab area Coors Can.


Same very recognizable font still used today.


I did a little puzzle work on this to figure out it was a Diet Rite Cola. 


Just a really random rock and I'm dying to know more of the story.  It reminds me a bit of the odd sign on Tucki Mountain that lists odd (and wrong) GPS coordinates.