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If you have the time this is a great read.

The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans

In the morning of October 21, 1996, Death Valley National Park (DVNP) Ranger Dave Brenner was aboard a military helicopter somewhere in the skies over the southerly part of Death Valley. He was part of a routine aerial surveillance looking for clandestine drug manufacturing labs in the backcountry. Around 11 AM, he saw something unexpected: A vehicle in the wash of Anvil Canyon, approximately 2.4 miles downstream from Willow Spring, the head of Anvil Canyon. This was extremely odd for several reasons.

First, there wasn’t a real or legal road down Anvil Canyon any longer. At one time Anvil Canyon had been the only route into Butte Valley, and used by the area’s miners. But with the opening of the talc mines in Warm Spring Canyon to the north, and the creation of a good, well graded dirt road to the talc mines for heavy trucks, the Butte Valley miners pushed an extension of the Warm Spring Road westward into Butte Valley and the Anvil Canyon route relegated to a seldom-used byway. Then, in October of 1994, with the passage of the Desert Protection Act, Anvil Canyon was designated as part of an official wilderness area, thus prohibiting vehicle use in it. Not that the few locals seemed to adhere to the prohibition, as Anvil Canyon still received occasional, if illicit, use.

The second piece of oddness in what Brenner was observing was that the vehicle appeared to be a standard passenger van. While Anvil Canyon could still be travelled by a competent four wheel drive vehicle (if illegally), a passenger van was totally inappropriate and couldn’t be expected to get far in that canyon. Yet there it was...