Death Valley – Not a Low Point of Our Journey!

February 5 – 8, 2022 

Our final stay in California took us to one more of its beautiful national parks.  We broke up the trip from Palm Springs to Death Valley with an overnight in Barstow, staying at a KOA conveniently located right off of I-15.  Speaking of convenient, three miles down the road from the campground was Calico ghost town!  The year 1880 found this town bustling with prospectors searching for silver.  By 1887, it had 22 saloons, its own version of Chinatown, a red-light district and a school house.  Like most towns in the west, when the price of silver plummeted, Calico became a ghost town.  In the 1950’s, Walter Knott (as in Knott’s Berry Farm) was interested in turning the ghost town into a historical theme park.  He began the task of rebuilding the town on the building’s original sites.  For some reason, he ended up donating the town to the county in 1966.  It’s now a county park and a treasure for all to enjoy!

Once we arrived at Death Valley National Park, we immediately began questioning if we had allowed enough time to explore this treasure!  There is a ton of wonderful things to see and do here -- way more than either Dick or I had anticipated!  With that in mind, we wasted no time on getting out to explore the park.

Badwater Basin is a “must see” spot in Death Valley!  It’s 282 feet below sea level and is the lowest spot in the western hemisphere!  It is the remains of an ancient sea that has mostly evaporated, leaving behind a mixture of salt and borax crystals. It’s named Badwater due to a surveyor’s mule refusing to drink the saline water.  The surveyor credited his mule’s refusal to the water being bad and the name stuck.  The water isn’t actually bad, it’s just salty!  This salt is actually responsible for the polygons you see as you are walking among the salt flats.  The water rises to the surface and somehow magically creates these polygons!

Dick is pointing to the "Sea Level" sign located 282 feet up the cliff!

The Artist’s Palette is another “must see” spot.  This is a nine-mile, one way loop that takes you past some of the most scenic rocks you can imagine.  Viewing it in the afternoon light highlights the varied colors of the rock.  Volcanic eruptions from way back spewed out a wide variety of minerals.  The colors are the result of the minerals oxidizing.  Really amazing!  I had read this is a drive to take in the late afternoon, but that must have been advice for summer visits.  The colors are much more impressive with early afternoon light this time of year.  There are a couple of overlook locations for you to pull over and go hiking among the rocks.  Being surrounded by the purple, orange, green, red, yellow, brown, and white rocks was fantastic!

Ubehebe Crater is really fascinating!  Some smart people have figured out that, 2000 years ago, rising magma ran into some ground water and their meeting created a steam and gas explosion!  The explosion left a 600-foot deep crater.  Debris flew six miles and in some places was 150 feet deep!  We hiked the 1.5-mile rim trail and enjoyed the view of the morning sun lighting up the crater.  It’s possible to hike to the bottom of the crater.  The path down looks easy enough but the coming up looks challenging.  Your feet sink ankle deep into the rock debris as you ascend the steep slopes of the crater.  If we had gotten an earlier start, I might have considered it, but with so much to see and such a short stay in the park, we took a pass on going down.  Next time!

When checking into Furnace Creek Campground, I asked the park ranger what her favorite trail is.  Without any hesitancy, she responded “The Mosaic Trail!”.  This is a 3-mile out and back trail, up a canyon that is a visual delight!  The narrow passages at the beginning of the trail are filled with dolomite that has been polished by rushing water and transformed into amazing swirls of marble.  Along with the dolomite is breccia, thought to be the remnants of a landslide that once filled the canyon, cemented together by calcium carbonate, creating a mosaic effect.  It was so stunning!  While hiking, we happened upon a geology class out on a field trip.  The students were busy sketching in their notepads.  I took a chance and guessed it was an art class.  Wrong!  What a fantastic place to see real life applications of geology!  I kind of wanted to pull up a rock, take a seat and see what I could learn!

The middle stretch of the hike had shrubs of desert holly scattered around.  They are so very close to blooming!  Death Valley’s bloom time is from mid-February to April.  It looks like we are a little early to see many flowers.  If the rain conditions are just right, the valley experiences a “Superbloom”.  That would certainly be something special to experience.  On average, it happens every ten years.  

Desert Holly about to bloom!

The last bit of the trail requires some scrambling.  We continued climbing for a bit on this section of the trail, but then decided we didn’t want all of the attention a med-evac rescue would cause and turned around!  This trail ranks among the most scenic trails I have ever hiked on!  Simply beautiful.  Thank you, park ranger, for a magnificent referral!

Another fantastic hike was the Golden Canyon Trail.  We turned it into a loop, extending the trail with the Badland Loop and Gower Gulch.  We added on another mile when we went out to Red Cathedral.  This all added up to a 6.4-mile hike with 1,100 feet gain in elevation.  We loved the breathtaking views, beautiful rock formations, and stunning variety of rock colors! 

This rock is a vivid purple color!  I need a real camera!

Death Valley is designated as an International Dark Sky Park.  We spent a couple of evenings enjoying the dark sky from our campsite.  As stunning as that was, I’m sure if we had driven to a more remote location in the park, it would have been even better.  Since we were staying at Furnace Creek Campground, it would have been very easy to do.  Furnace Creek is the only campground in the park that accepts reservations and has hookups.  We had booked site 47 well in advance and were lucky to have a site with hookups.  The campground was full during our stay.  

Another park ranger recommended visiting Dantes View for sunrise.  This was another bit of good advice!  Dantes View is at an elevation of over 5,000 feet and provides stunning views of Death Valley.  The sun rose up from the mountains behind us just moments after we completed the 45-minute drive there!  Talk about timing!  Slowly, the sun started shining on the Panamint Range on the far side of the valley.  As the sun lit up the mountains, the purple hues of the rock came to life.  Really pretty!  It was also really chilly!  We wore our winter coats and gloves as it was 38°!  In the valley below, we could see Badwater Basin and the salt deposits we had walked on earlier during our visit!

Badwater Basin and the salt flats are below.

Telescope Peak is the two-mile-high, snow capped mountain on the other side of the valley.

Zabriskie Point would be another good choice for sunrise or sunset.  We went there shortly after sunrise and really appreciated the early morning light on the golden-colored badlands below the lookout.  There was a large number of photographers there at the same time.  They all belong to a group who traveled here and are photographing picturesque parts of the park.  I guess we picked the right lighting to be here to take pictures!  Later, when we were hiking the Badland loop, it was fun to look up at and see Zabriskie Point! 

An interpretive trail of Harmony Borax Works site, one of Death Valley’s first borax operations, taught us a lot about this mineral.  Although mining for gold, silver, copper, lead, zinc and other minerals was big in Death Valley, the most profitable mineral was borax.  Used by blacksmiths, potters, dairy farmers, housewives, meat packers and morticians, this product was the “white gold of the desert”.  Heck, I use borax today to treat our black and grey tanks!  It was interesting to learn about the process of extracting borax from the salt deposits left behind when Lake Manly evaporated.  “20 Mule Team Borax” is a real thing, not just a logo!  The borax companies used teams of 20 mules to haul the finished product out of Death Valley and to market.  I kind of wish we had some of those mules to haul us around the park.  They do have a gas station here, but the price of diesel is $7.649/gallon.  Yep!  I typed that correctly!

20 Mule Team Borax wagon complete with drinking water tank

Although we didn’t see any burros during our stay, the park does have an exploding population of burros.  They are not native to the park and are considered invasive.  They were brought here by early prospectors and have become a bit of a problem for the park.  The burros aggressively defend their territory, keeping native species such as desert bighorn away from water and food sources.  

Death Valley even has sand dunes to climb around on.  I’m not sure why they are called the Mesquite Sand dunes because the only vegetation I noticed was the creosote bush.  I was so excited to see the creosote bush because it was BLOOMING!  In my mind, finding a bush blooming in the desert is a big “win”!  Dick and I enjoyed hiking a short way into the sand dunes and then finding a spot to sit down in the silky sand and recover from a full day of exploring and hiking! Taking off our shoes and feeling the sand between our toes was the perfect way to end a day of experiencing some of Death Valley’s highlights! 

California has been an amazing experience!  We have greatly enjoyed the opportunity to see and taste so much of this beautiful state.  Although Death Valley is geographically a “low point’, it certainly was not a low point in our travels! 

Next up:  Las Vegas!