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Published: March 4th 2008
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Obfuscator writes: We had gone to bed early enough in Death Valley that waking up at around sunrise posed no problems. There weren't any shower facilities, or anything to delay us, so we packed our gear up and rolled out quickly, which was nice, since we beat most of the RV-people out of the campground . The first thing we decided to do was backtrack to a point called Dante's View, which was supposed to afford us one of the best views of the valley. I think Onaxthiel was vaguely concerned about the 15% grade to the end of the drive there, until I reminded him that our uncle in Seattle lives at the top of a 19% grade.
Dante's View really is one of the finest in the park, at least from the ones we saw. The reason is that you get to look out over almost the whole valley in one place, from more than 5000 feet up. The overall effect is pretty similar to that you get from looking down at things from airplanes, because the mountain you're on drops more or less vertically down to the valley floor. We got there pretty soon after sunrise, so
the sun was still quite low in the sky. I think this may have hurt our photographic opportunities, but there were still plenty of other people there with expensive looking cameras and tripods as we say, “appreciating photography on a much deeper level than we were.”
We went from this, one of the highest points in the park (not the highest, which is Telescope Peak at 11,049 feet), down to the lowest point in the park, and in the western hemisphere. Badwater Basin sits at 282 feet below sea level, and reaches summer high averages of 115 degrees Fahrenheit. Luckily, in the spring, Death Valley is downright pleasant, if rather dry. It was probably in the 70's as we were wandering around, which meant we were nowhere near dying of heat exhaustion or anything. Badwater Basin isn't really what I expected, but then, neither is pretty much anything we encountered in Death Valley. I guess I was expecting a pretty desolate place with lots of sand, and in fact, that's just not what it's like. There are some areas of sand dunes in the valley, but they're the exception, not the rule. By and large, the soil is sort
of a dry, rocky dirt with sand mix, and there's a lot of scrubby vegetation. There's also an abundance of wildflowers in many parts of the valley, which were both shocking and lovely. Badwater Basin itself is really a big salt flat. It's got none of the flowers, or even the scrub. It's just a big salty basin, with a few little pools of very salty water in it.
Our next stop was a Natural Bridge. We got to drive up about a mile and a half of gravel road, and then hike up about another half mile or so further on the same surface, which actually proved to be quite annoying. The gravel had a lot of give under your feet, so it was more like walking on sand than it was like normal gravel. The Natural Bridge was kind of cool, though I guess at this point in the trip, I've seen more impressive ones. It was big, and you could walk all around it though. In the same trail, you could also see evidence of some neat waterfalls and flows and such, that no longer exist.
A bit further down the road, we took a
Our road trip:
Putting the FUN in the funeral mountains nice detour called Artist's Drive, which was very colorful. Apparently that place is even better to visit in the late afternoon, when the light hits it better, but it was still pretty nice in the morning. Further still, we took a long hike at Mosaic Canyon, after passing some big dunes up. We've seen dunes, and they're sort of a pain to walk on. Mosaic Canyon, on the other hand, was a fascinating. It was about a mile in length, and had wonderful marble walls that were polished smooth in many places. There were also rock walls that looked like amalgamated concrete. These walls had lots of little stones contained within them, and seemed to be somehow cobbled together.
Our last stop in Death Valley was at Scotty's Castle, which seems to prove the old adage that truth is stranger than fiction. Death Valley Scotty, whose real name was Walter Scott, was a con artist who performed in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show for some time, until Buffalo Bill fired him for missing a show. Later, he turned to going around conning people into investing in his Death Valley gold mine. The only problem turned out to be that
he never had a gold mine. That didn't stop him from traveling around telling people about it and spending money like he had it though. Eventually he found the perfect sucker in a wealthy east coast insurance man, and built a huge Spanish style mansion in Death Valley, which he named Scotty's Castle. Amazingly, even after discovering Scotty's fraud, the businessman remained friends with him, and even provided for his well being after he himself had died. Scotty's Castle eventually came to rest in the care of the National Parks Service, where it remains to this day. It's truly a tribute to the craftsmanship that went into it, and to the power of childless rich people. We walked all around it, and visited Scotty's grave, but opted not to take the tours of the inside, since they were prohibitively expensive.
From Death Valley, we drove into Nevada, and turned north and east, driving the perimeter of Area 51. We couldn't really see anything interesting, since it was dark by the time we got there, but we did stop in the tiny town of Rachel for dinner at the Little “Ale”Inn. This kitschy spot was pretty neat with lots of
Area 51 merch and cool pictures all over. Our cute waitress (who coincidentally had ended up living in Rachel by running out of money on a roadtrip) also told us a bit about Rachel. Apparently the town has only been there since the late 70's, and was named for the first baby born there. Little Rachel went on to suffocate in the Mount Saint Helen's explosion . . . so umm . . . there you go. (Onaxthiel adds: and, she happened to go to art school in Portland, Maine, where we spent Halloween weekend a few months ago.)
We kept driving after Rachel, and pulled into Las Vegas after 10:00 PM. Las Vegas is really pretty looking at night, coming from above it in the mountains. Nevertheless, they apparently don't have such a thing as affordable accommodations in the festering city, so we drove on toward Hoover Dam, where we found a cheap campground in the Lake Meade National Recreational Area to sleep for the night. Of course, the incredible wind blowing sand at us all night didn't really help with the whole sleep thing.
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