{Note: on Monday this week I had carpal tunnel surgery done on my right hand and so I'm typing this with my left hand...mostly.}
It is only about three hours drive to the national park from here so it was a leisurely day. We planned a stay at Tecopa Hot Springs in one of their little cabins so we wouldn't have to go all the back in one day and, again, we had a really nice visit there. Tecopa is a weird place--truly just a wide spot in the road--there is one restaurant in another wide spot ten miles up the road. Other than that, it is an hour's drive to the nearest town with any other restaurant or store or anything. But the "waters" are lovely. Everytime we go, there are several Japanese couples also visiting for the theraputic benefits for which the hot springs are internationally known.
Death Valley--to use a fourth grade adjective--is cool. The air temperature was 85, and therefore bearable the day before the vernal equinox--you can hardly get any spring-ier than that! By summer it will be a blast furnace. The place itself is very interesting. If you're not intrigued by geology, don't bother. However, if rocks and the formation of the earth with its attendant geothermal anomalies and breccia and mineral deposits and uplifts and sedimentation and fault lines are just up your alley, then COME ON DOWN! Death Valley has it all.
We kept wondering aloud about the dismay of those poor early settlers just wanting to get to California who mistakenly ended up trying to cross this piece of forsaken territory. It's quite clear when you finally get over the eastern mountains into the basin that leaving won't be easy. The mountains on the western rim soar from the floor straight up 11,000 feet. There are no foothills and no obvious passes. The rivers that flow into Death Valley just sink into the earth and then bubble up elsewhere in its vastness bringing mineral deposits with them that turn any pond into a brackish salt-rimmed pool where only small organisms more suited for the ocean can live. And Death Valley is very long, north to south, so just gutting it out and walking either of those directions isn't exactly easy either. But it was the only way to leave.
At the visitor's center there's a motto coined by the 19th century people who passed through:
20 miles from wood, 20 miles from water, 40 feet from Hell
Yup. But, in a modern conveyance, with air conditioning, water bottles, and our sunscreen, we had a lovely day in Hell. So did hordes of other visitors, and it was interesting to listen to their conversations, many of which were conducted in a variety of languages I do not speak or understand. It was an international day in one of America's most unique National Parks. We heard Italian, Portuguese, French, Spanish, Japanese, Hebrew, and a Slavic language I did not recognize and didn't feel brazen enough to ask its speakers to identify. (Imagine! me---shy...) Here are some photos, which will do more credit to the scenery than my description.
This sign at the entrance points out that the Timbasha Shoshone live here. They have lived here for many centuries, and they have a little settlement down the road from the visitor's center. You are invited to go visit them, and another time I'd like to just to admire people who have such amazing stamina and adaptability to have as their ancestral home such a forbidding environment. Their homes are clustered in an small oasis by Furnace Creek. There are green places in Death Valley. But they are outnumbered by the dry ones.
If you look carefully in the very center of this photo, you will see a tiny sign that says "Sea Level". As a visitor stands reading the information on the signs that overlook a vast white playa identified as Badwater, many other visitors are walking as they follow the boardwalk to its end out onto the saltbed. One of the instructions on the visitor information plaque is to look over your shoulder. There, high up the cliffs opposite of where you've parked your car is this sign that is easier to read standing there, than in my photo. It points out how high up the cliff you must go to get to sea level. You are standing at the lowest point in the contiguous United States: Badwater Basin--282 feet below sea level. Cool.
It would have been very daunting to stumble into this valley thinking you were almost to the ocean, or at least in the part of California where you could mine gold and have some neighbors, too. But some people finally found something to mine--borax--and while I don't know if it made anyone wealthy, it does make your laundry nice.We'll go back to Death Valley. There are several roads that take you to a trail head where a short hike leads you to another fascinating nature effect. But, we'll go hiking next year in November or December. Here's one last amazing view: Zabriskie Point. It has no plant life, but it has vivid colors, textures and geology!
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