San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
How this amateur adventurer hiked Death Valley solo.
A preschool teacher who hiked the desert solo tells his tale.
Roland Banas’ first night in Death Valley’s remote north did not bode well. The mercury was flirting with freezing, the winds would not relent, and after accidentally puncturing his inflatable sleeping pad, the 44-year-old Frenchman found himself sleeping on the hard, frigid desert ground.
“Keep on pushing,” he told himself: Only six days and 151 miles of punishing desert hiking left.
Banas is not your average explorer. A casual hiker with minimal experience adventuring and not much time for training — “I like hiking, but with two little kids and living in Sacramento I don’t get out very often” — Banas, improbably, became the second person to hike the length of Death Valley unsupported in December. Days later, with his grueling feat in the record books, he went back to his job running the preschool he owns in Citrus Heights, outside Sacramento, near his home in Orangevale.
Banas, a self-proclaimed “regular guy” who hikes maybe three times a week, says he was inspired by a drive to prove that adventuring isn’t just the purview of professionals.
“When you read in the media the exploits of adventurers and explorers, it always seems so ‘out there.’ These people are depicted as so extraordinary and unusual and extreme,” Banas says. “But they are not that different than me and you, I figured.”
So, he decided to chart an adventure for himself: 167 miles, from the northern end of Death Valley to the south, by himself, with no consistent
trails or potable water available along the way.
The setting for Banas’ expedition is, famously, no picnic. Carved from the northern Mojave, the valley earned its moniker the old-fashioned way — by killing Gold Rushera settlers. The group, dubbed the Lost ’49ers, stumbled into the uncharted valley in wintertime and, without vegetation for the oxen or food and water for the families, would have starved were it not for a pair of able-bodied young men who managed to leave and return with supplies. When the last of the ravaged group of emigrants escaped the then-unnamed valley’s confines in early 1850, one turned to survey the basin a last time and proclaimed, “goodbye, Death Valley.” The name stuck after several early travelers died.
Famed for its summertime temperatures (record high: 134 degrees Fahrenheit), salt flats and sand dunes, the region was declared a national monument by President Herbert Hoover in the 1930s during a particularly productive conservation kick at the end of his presidency. The 1.6 million acres Hoover set aside was “one of the greatest scenic spectacles in America,” the monument’s first superintendent, John R. White, wrote in 1933. “When developed, it will probably rank with the Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Yosemite and the Sequoias of California,” adding that it “has the color, depth and spaciousness of the Grand Canyon, with a variety and charm of its own.” (The only thing preventing from becoming a “first class national park,” he noted, was lack of “streams and lakes for fishing.”) In 1994, President Clinton bumped the region up to national park status.
More than 20 years passed, however, before anyone hiked the length of the valley unsupported — that is, without help from someone else or supply caches stashed along the route. Then, in 2015, Banas read that Belgian explorer Louis-Philippe Loncke tackled the challenge over eight days. The expedition left Loncke, a professional explorer with extensive experience hiking in the world’s most unforgiving climates, exhausted, mildly injured and thrilled to even compete the journey.
Banas read between the lines of Loncke’s experience.
“I thought, you know, this is not too far from my place and it doesn’t sound too hard — maybe I can try to do it myself,” he says. “I’m not saying it’s easy. It’s a challenge. But it’s within reach for a hiker.”
Banas, who had never sought to earn an FKT (fastest known time) or “world first” of any kind, reached out to Loncke and dug into the logistics: How many calories would he need per day? How much water would he have to haul? He’d have to haul a lot, because there are no rivers or lakes or other reliable water sources around the route. He bought GPS equipment, plotted his route and tried to figure out every step of his journey before he set off. Then he failed.
And then he failed again. A water bag leaked one time; temperatures were too high on another attempt, and he realized he hadn’t packed enough water. All told, he aborted four times from 2016 to 2018.
So, as he entered the northern end of the valley in late December, Banas was determined. “I was mad for failing multiple times before,” he says. “I was so dead on finishing this time.”
He also created a little more inspiration for his final push. Before the trek, he set up a GoFundMe page to raise money for the Mustard Seed School, a private school that educates homeless kids in Sacramento.
The motivation worked. Over the course of six days, 23 hours and 55 minutes (technically spread across eight days), Banas trudged through lunar-esque salt flats, jagged fields of rocks, and acres of sand dunes. On the whole, he covered 166 miles and raised $1,450 for the Mustard Seed School.
The slog was worth it, he wrote in a post-trip briefing on ExplorerWeb, a website for outdoor adventurers: “I needed the challenge to unplug from my daily life for a while. To Reset. And I did.” Back home in suburban Sacramento in January, Banas says he hopes the adventure could be inspiration for the kids at the Mustard Seed School — “We can dream and shoot for something that’s uncommon and get there” — as well as the regular guys out there. “Look, this guy’s just a small-business owner and a dad, and he did it,” he says.
David Ferry is a writer in Los Angeles. Email: travel@ sfchronicle.com