The "Death Valley Deluxe Trip" (Feb. 28 - March 3, 2017) put together by Especially 4-U Tours was the WORST vacation my husband and I have ever experienced. It was characterized by poor planning, confusion, and a total lack of knowledge about Death Valley National Park and park regulations.
The worst occurred on March 2, when we departed from our hotel and headed to Death Valley National Park. Our tour guide informed us that he had just found out that several of the sites we had planned to visit were closed due to mudslides. [Information regarding road closures was easily available on the National Parks website (nps.gov) and could have been easily accessed a few days before the tour, so that a full plan of alternate sites could have been formulated. WHY was this not done?] Our tour guide decided on the spot that we would visit other sites, and proceeded to direct the driver of our 55-passenger tour bus to go to Dante's View. After some unnerving hairpin turns, we arrived at the site and, indeed, the view was incredible. We took photos, and returned to the bus. There, all of the passengers waited, and waited, and waited for our tour guide and bus driver to return to the bus. After 40 minutes I learned that park rangers had fined our tour guide and bus driver, because Dante's View only allowed vehicles up to 25' in length, and our tour bus was over 40' long. Our tour guide knew nothing about this size restriction. (Later, I was able to learn about vehicle length restrictions online after about 10 minutes of searching.) We had to wait while other rangers were summoned to close the road down below to drivers heading up to the site, so that the road would be safe enough for our size bus to descend. NOTE: The National Park Service has specific guidelines for commercial bus tours (again, these guidelines are easily available online, in their "Step-On Guide Service" publication). In order to receive a Commercial Use Authorization to conduct tours in Death Valley National Park, the guidelines state that "the guide must be familiar with Park regulations regarding vehicle length restriction, bus parking and passenger loading and unloading." Pleading ignorance of vehicle length restrictions is unacceptable. This is a commercial for-profit operation, responsible for the safe transportation of their paying clientele. Due diligence would have prevented potentially putting passengers at risk.
In addition to the delay caused when we visited the first site, we also found out that many of the alternative sites our tour guide had chosen would be inaccessible to us because of vehicle length restrictions at those sites. So we had very few options open to us. When we visited Zabriskie Point, our bus driver had to park far away, because of bus size, making it near impossible for most of our group to be able to walk up to the hill where we could view anything worthwhile. This stop basically became a bathroom break. We spent about 30 minutes at the Furnace Creek Visitor Center. When we pulled into the Badwater site, our tour guide stated that because of time restrictions, we could only spend 10-15 minutes there. My husband would have liked to be able to walk out onto the flats, so that he could look back and take a photo of the cliffs, but the time restriction made this impossible. Although earlier our tour guide had mentioned that our last stop would be at the famous dunes, we never stopped there, but instead headed out to Vegas. When I asked him why he skipped this stop, he said that the driver was only allowed a certain amount of time per day to drive, and we were running too late to stop at the dunes (he never had announced that we would have to skip this).
So, our "Death Valley Deluxe Trip" basically ended up being a drive to just one decent site, Dante's View (which legally we shouldn't have even been allowed to access). And while we were driving through Death Valley National Park, our tour guide knew nothing about the park's history, geology, etc. Every time I asked a question, he did not have an answer. It was his first time in Death Valley. Apparently he did not even bone up on some simple background information he could have shared with us. This brief tour was to celebrate our upcoming 45-year wedding anniversary -- we had never been to Death Valley and hoped to create some lasting memories -- well, we now have lasting memories, just not the ones we had hoped for.
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