23-FEB-2008
I have somehow managed to find beauty in this landscape.
It's desolate.
It's dry.
It's foreboding and not welcoming in the least.
But the tenacity of life is evident every where you look.
You just have to look.
23-FEB-2008
The delicacy of the flowers in Death Valley is amazing.
One would have thought that only the most thorny, tough skinned plants could survive.
Then you stop and look a little closer and you find delicately colored petals that are soft and beautiful.
23-FEB-2008
The gold rush brought settlers to the areas around Death Valley, and even some to Death Valley itself.
Today "desert gold" thrives in the lower elevations.
Down on the desert floor where it gets hottest in the summer, you find these beautiful daisy-like flowers that cling to life and brighten any landscape.
23-FEB-2008
Even where very little else can survive, desert gold thrives.
23-FEB-2008
The one thing you should consider when going to Death Valley, aside from having plenty of water, is that the roads are long. It can take 2 hours to drive from one side of the park to the other. This is the kind of place that deserves a week to explore. We still had fun with one weekend.
23-FEB-2008
We drove to Bad Water where you can see the large salt flats and where it is the lowest point in North America. -282 feet below sea level. As you walk further from the parking area (and all the other people) the salt gets whiter and whiter.
23-FEB-2008
The landscape also gets very rough for a while.
23-FEB-2008
So many years of salt evaporation!
23-FEB-2008
This is just a detail of the ground in this area of the flats.
23-FEB-2008
The salt crystals look remarkably like fur on the earth.
It's so delicate and small. Amazing what beauty there is in such an inanimate object.
I felt kind of bad walking on the salt knowing that I was squishing down these beautiful crystal structures.
23-FEB-2008
The distances are so vast out here that the scale is very difficult to judge. Those mountains are much further away than they appear.
23-FEB-2008
Warning! The salt will shrink you to a tiny proportion of yourself if you stay out on it too long or go out on it too far. Be careful! Salt leeches moisture from your body and so prolonged contact to it does something similar to drying fruit. (You know those little dried apricots are no where near the size of their plump juicy ancestors.) This is the number one reason people tell you to bring water to Death Valley, especially if you go out onto the salt flats. You have to rehydrate to prevent this kind of thing from staying permanent!
23-FEB-2008
As we got farther from the parking lot, the patterns in the salt became less disturbed. It was beautiful to see this pattern as far as I could see.
23-FEB-2008
This is exactly what I had come to Badwater to see. I was glad that we had decided to walk far enough to get to this point. It takes quite a while to reach. It's worth it!
23-FEB-2008
After Bad Water Basin, we headed to the Devil's Golfcourse. Here is another deposit of salt, but it's hard to call this a "salt flat". It's anything but flat.
23-FEB-2008
It's amazing what salt can do.
23-FEB-2008
It also amazes me how much it looks like snow!
There were many holes that went so far down I could not see the bottom. A bit scary, really. It felt like I was walking on something hollow. And to think that it's just salt crystals that were holding me back from an abyss was strange. I don't know how deep the little holes were. (They were small enough that I couldn't have fit my hand into them.) I don't know why they were there. They were neat, though.
23-FEB-2008
After Devil's Golfcourse we drove around the scenic Arist's Drive. We climbed a little hill and got a beautiful view of the area.
23-FEB-2008
The colors are muted. The distances are vast. The landscape is breathtaking.
23-FEB-2008
We ended up at what is called "Artist's Palette". I can see why it's called that. All the minerals in the Earth have made such beautiful colors on the rock. It's an amazing sight!
23-FEB-2008
This is another area near Artist's Palette.
23-FEB-2008
After the Artist's Drive we tried to avoid the madding crowds at Golden Canyon and went to Desolation Canyon instead. It was desolate!
23-FEB-2008
It always amazes me that the landscape essentially hides canyons. Who would know that there was a canyon to explore back there? But that's where we're headed!
23-FEB-2008
This is the only non-insect or non-bird (that wasn't also a human) that we saw the entire time we were there.
23-FEB-2008
The surprising bits of color were always a nice treat in an otherwise brown landscape.
23-FEB-2008
It might seem brown everywhere you look, but when you take a minute to start to really look at the surroundings, the color becomes more evident.
23-FEB-2008
The canyon ended in a large hill of gravel. It is about 60 feet high. Climbing it would have been really hard.
23-FEB-2008
As we approached the mouth of the canyon we got spectacular glimpses of the valley floor below!
23-FEB-2008
These were very promising clouds.
23-FEB-2008
We really hoped that these clouds meant rain would fall.
That would be a nice treat.
23-FEB-2008
The desert gold looked great against dark looming storm clouds.
23-FEB-2008
I love the way the flowers snaked into the hills. Just beautiful.
23-FEB-2008
A gorgeous end to a gorgeous first day.
24-FEB-2008
"Happy birthday to me! Happy birthday to me! Happy birthday, dear me, Happy birthday to me!"
It was so amazing to wake up on my birthday in Beatty, Nevada after having heard it rain in the night and to realize that it wasn't a dream. Rain in the desert. Rare, even in the winter.
Death Valley averages less than 2 inches of rain a year!
24-FEB-2008
It was crazy light in the morning after the rain. We thought perhaps there would be more rain, but no.
24-FEB-2008
After a wonderful Mexican breakfast, we went to Ubehebe Crater. It is remarkable how the landscape changes even while within the park.
24-FEB-2008
600 feet deep. I wish I had some scale to show you, but it was early, cold and incredibly windy so not many people were there yet.
24-FEB-2008
Here you go. Here's a bit more scale.
24-FEB-2008
After Ubehebe Crater we went to Scotty's Castle. There were places to walk through the canyon behind the "castle" that had the remains of the construction equipment used to build the castle.
24-FEB-2008
This shack is where the men who were building the castle would go for showers, etc. It had running hot and cold water.
24-FEB-2008
This is what seemed to be called the Devil's cornfield.
Lots of Devils in Death Valley...
24-FEB-2008
Ravens are cute. Cute, but a bit frightening!
24-FEB-2008
Next we went to Mosaic Canyon.
It's a beautiful slot canyon that clearly shows the effects of fast moving water.
It has polished the rock to smooth marble.
It's really amazingly gorgeous!
24-FEB-2008
This was one of my favorite canyons to walk through. It was just beautiful!
24-FEB-2008
The effects of fast moving water are so evident!
24-FEB-2008
I loved this old stair/ladder. I wonder how old it is, and whether that area you can walk to the right of it existed when it was built.
24-FEB-2008
As we were leaving the sun was getting lower and the canyon was getting shady and beautiful.
24-FEB-2008
As we drove out of the park the mountains and the sun were just beautiful.
24-FEB-2008
It was a perfect end to a perfect birthday, a perfect day, and a perfect trip.