Ever been to Death Valley? It is a weird weird place. I’ll just show you the photos from our recent excursion. Long post, so get comfortable.
The human element interests me, or “cultural history” as the National Parks refer to it. These wagons hauled borax a long distance away, which some very hardy (or weird) folks mined for about 5 years in the 1880s. It wasn’t profitable.Always looking for things to draw.“Artist’s Palette” along Artist’s Drive: how it looked on a gray day.Yup. It rained.How it looks in the picture books (I used some cheater setting on my camera).Golden Canyon, really just another shade of brown. The dark spot is Trail Guy.Red Cathedral looks reddish in the distance, but faded to another shade of brown when we got close.Does it look redder in the distance? Maybe. The contrast is nice.Weird. This is a fancy-pants oasis with GREEN LAWN!!On a sunny day we followed a road (on foot) up past the place where we stayed. We were told there was a spring up there.Weird. These are dead palm trees, not a tipi. They are non-native, so are frowned upon by the Park.LOOK! Cactus and a cabin!The spring area had lots of growing things, including goldenrod, just like in Mineral King. Weird.When there is water on the soil in Death Valley, it brings up borax. It made for nice spongy footing. Just another weird feature of DV.
What? Was the old cabin owner a baker??His kitchen still looks like this.Little scraps of life. . . why are they still here? Why are they all broken? Weird.I was entranced by the massive tamarisk trees on the side of his cabin. These are native to Israel and frowned upon in DV. It was thrilling to see trees, just thrilling! (Or was it the shade that was thrilling?)The little structure on the side isn’t a doghouse. Maybe he killed big horn sheep and hung the meat in that semi-underground shed.Desert Holly was a common sight.
BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE. . .
Nice light in the late afternoon. Makes the browns look more golden.A view across the valley to the Panamint Range, which got snow when we got rain.Trail Guy is doing his thing, checking out the view with the binoculars.Weird rock thing.Another weird rock thing.Apparently, what looks weird to me is common in DV.I love historic structures, particularly stone ones.Let’s go home. This place makes me hot and thirsty. (And please admire the way the pick-’em-up truck blends in. . . the color is “Desert Gold”.)
Death Valley is the largest National Park in the lower 48 states and includes 7 (SEVEN!) mountain ranges. It is the hottest place on earth and gets maybe 2″ of rain a year. Although it is straight across the mountains from us, it takes more than 6 hours to get there. Everything in the desert seems to be designed to hurt or kill you – heat, lack of water, water that contains tremendous salinity or even arsenic, thorns on everything that grows. Oh, and scorpions too. The folks who choose to live and work there are warriors, soldiers, and unusually tough people. I am not one of them, but our good friend is, so we went to visit her. I’m glad we did, and glad we got to come home.
