Grateful and Proud: Death Valley

Here’s another travel retrospective post in my Grateful and Proud series.

The second fall we were on the road, which was 2021, we spent a mere week in Death Valley. I loved it there and would have returned, like, right away, but now I wonder if my ecstatic feelings were due to the fact that I hadn’t really been to beautiful deserts yet. In any case, I blogged nearly every day we were there and took tons of photos, but nothing I wrote or grabbed with my cheap phone describes the place that well, even compared to my memories now, five years later. The vastness, the subtle colors, the surprising amount of tenacious life, the knowledge that everything changes entirely when it rains. Death Valley is full of wonder.

Surprisingly Superlatives

The basics, in case you don’t know (I didn’t know): Death Valley is indeed a giant valley, and most of it is now protected as a national park in California, right on the border with Nevada, with one corner kinda near Las Vegas.

Here are the superlatives. It’s

• the hottest place on Earth (128 degrees F in 2013);
• the driest national park in the U.S. (averages two inches of rain); and
• the lowest elevation in North America (-282 feet).  

(Heck, any of those could have intensified since we were there; seems like Death Valley has been in the news a lot lately with flooding, as well as heat.)

Our Campground

Before this stay, we’d camped outside of national parks, boondocking when we could, since dogs aren’t allowed anywhere in a park except on roads. But, by this time, we’d gotten tired of the long drives into the parks from the trailer; it meant that for us to hike early we had to leave the trailer at the crack of dawn to beat the tourists. We also really didn’t want to try to boondock outside this park because all the land was really crowded with campers.

This time we treated ourselves to the luxury of a park campground, which meant your own campsite and a park ranger driving through every once in a while making sure people keep their dogs on leash.  Oh, and dumpsters, yay! We’d been boondocking quite a bit. No more storing our trash in the truck.

Now, we still didn’t have electric hookups, and it was indeed hot there, around 90 during the day (this was late Oct/early Nov) with no shade at the campsite. So, we left early to hike anyway, and we set up the trailer so it stayed cool for Banjo while we were away. I remember clearly fretting about this the first time we left her alone in the trailer with no AC, in Death Valley of all places, and I insisted Tracy hurry us back after the hike. When we opened the trailer door, instead of a dead dog I was greeted by an eager dog who jumped out and lay herself right in the sun. That’s Banjo for ya. Okay, no more worrying.

After allowing Banjo to get settled for her requisite sunbathing, we’d open up the trailer and extend all the awnings and put up a beach umbrella and then lie around outside in the shade. At night, the stars come out full-force. It’s really quite pleasant there, even without a.c.

Hiking Canyons

Slot canyons are pretty common there due to flash floods, and they make for lovely hikes. The revealed geology is surprisingly colorful and varied in texture. When we hiked up Golden Canyon, our path was a wash made of soft, clay-like rock with gravel on top of the wash bed, and ahead of us the sun was still rising against the tallest peaks.

The canyon walls were soft to the touch. It was very cool to walk down these narrow washes like this, literally and figuratively.

The trail we were on ended at an area called Red Cathedral. 

It’s impossible to photograph because I didn’t have a lens to take in the heights and the vast expanse of rock above our heads. Still, you can see why it’s called that.

Mosaic Canyon is another slot canyon like Golden, but the geology is much different.  The rock there has been turned to marble due to so much flash flooding, and it’s as smooth as a marble countertop in places. 

We walked along the widest parts with a gravel floor; even the wash provided excellent views of the mountains around us.

Once we climbed up into the canyon though, the slot became increasingly narrow and steep. With such hard, smooth stone under us, we had to scramble up the wash in several places; we had to take turns giving each other our hiking poles so we could use both hands and feel to climb. This was a first for me, although I learned to get better at it over the years and not hate it. What I really still don’t like is loose rocks that slide under your feet, and this place didn’t have any, so this was a nice intro to scrambling for me.

Hiking Basins

Badwater Basin is a different area in the park where geologic shifts create a low spot that gets so little rainfall that not much debris gets washed into it, so it gets lower and lower with each geologic movement. That’s hard to wrap your head around.

Any standing water at the lowest basins is sometimes saltier than the ocean.  

There’s a sign up on the mountain behind this that shows sea level, but it’s so high up I couldn’t get a decent photo of it!

There’s rare life that lives in the ultra-salty water, and animals won’t drink from it (hence the name from historic mule trains passing through). Badwater. 

Nearby, the salt has been whipped into big chunks by wind, and I mean big chunks. These chunks are hard and sharp, so you’re taking your life in your hands walking atop the mounds. White people named it Devil’s Golf Course. You can hardly walk on it though, it’s that hard and sharp and spikey.

Tracy was holding his water bottle in one hand and his phone in the other to take this picture of me, and he almost lost his balance. It was probably the most dangerous thing we’d done there, including climbing those marble rock faces in the slot canyons.

The remnants of old rivers that ran through Death Valley are just little trickling creeks now, but the fish that lived in the rivers have survived and evolved to live in each isolated, salty creek. We walked along a boardwalk that led us safely over Salt Creek, where its tiny Pupfish live and are eaten by the few water birds in Death Valley.  

Several of these fish specifies are threatened or endangered, but I think the pupfish (too small for me to get a good shot) are in okay shape. They skittered away from our shadows and the vibrations of us clomping along the boardwalk, but we could see prints from herons in the sand below them. 

Driving Around

One day we gave our feet and legs a break from hiking and instead drove to famous views and sites you can access from your car.

Artists’ Drive is a one-way road along hills and canyons that were formed via multiple volcanoes that left layers of various minerals. The mineral deposits, with the help of a lot of wind and a little rain, have turned green, blue, red, yellow, all in streaks and blobs that do look like a paint palette. I really like the pink, which hardly shows on my phone camera, but you get the idea.

We also clanked up and up a long road to the top of a ridge on the Black Mountains to look down on Dante’s View. We went up so high that the outside temperature dropped from 90F to 70 in a half-hour drive. 

From here on clear days you can see both the highest and lowest points in the 48 states: the highest being Mount Whitney (~14,505 ft high) and the lowest being Death Valley’s Badwater Basin (−282 ft) low.  Pretty cool.

Everywhere you look in Death Valley, the angle of the sun determines the entire scene, so with each new minute you get a new view. You can see why I want to go back.

My Birthday on Tattooine

One year we spent Halloween at a place called Tate’s Hell, and this year it was Death Valley. You’d think we’d planned it! My birthday comes the day after, so for a treat, we went out to dinner at one of those tourist places inside the park. The treat at this place was less the food, the service, or even the views of sunset behind the mountains. It was three hours of doing nothing productive or even practical at all, which was a real treat in those days of every day being moving, hiking, or planing.

I say Tatooine because several Star Wars scenes from two of its movies were filmed in Death Valley. The land was protected as a national monument back then, not a national park and national wilderness like it is now, so it was legal to shoot film. I can’t imagine a crew there; some parts of the ecosystem seem so fragile, supporting both threatened and endangered species, plus there are 1,000-year-old indigenous artifacts from the Timbisha Shoshone tribe to protect. But, it wasn’t until 1994 that Death Valley became a national park; before then the area was mined for Borax, and passed through by pioneers, and a hunk of Star Wars was filmed there. 

The NPS app provides an audio tour of the filming locations, but each audio snippet is very short. Tracy thinks we could do a better job and make our fortunes with our own app.  I’ll add that idea to the list, although not if it brings more people to visit Death Valley, because I’d like it to remain unchanged for when I visit it again.