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Vacation: Death Valley, November 2005, Page One | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Valley National Monument is located in eastern California, along the
Nevada border. It's in the desert, roughly due east of Los Angeles, and
is one of the most beautiful national parks in the entire United States.
Beauty is always in the eye of the beholder, and that's especially true of the desert. Rocks and sand and a complete lack of trees or vegetation are definitely acquired tastes, and I can imagine some people who wouldn't like Death Valley at all. It's a rugged, inhospitable beauty, and while there are a number of natural springs and oasis areas in Death Valley, most of the time you're hiking or driving somewhere that would kill you in a day, if you lost your water and your way. Well, if there weren't thousands of other tourists all over the place to get help from, that is. I've been to Death Valley half a dozen times in my life, and always enjoyed it. I went with my mom every other year or so when I was oh, age 10-18 or so, and we were poor and didn't mind roughing it, so we camped out and slept in a tent and went hiking all day and walked over to the communal showers at the middle of the campground. For this most recent visit we were a lot less rough, her husband came along, and we all stayed in a nice hotel room with a shower and two queen beds. We still did a lot of hiking and driving around though, and this time, unlike my childhood visits, I was accompanied by a digital camera. As these two pages of photos and captions attest. Enjoy.
Death Valley Areas Photographed:
This is not yet in Death Valley -- this is just California high desert... where the roads are often quite straight.
Another view from the high desert on the way there. The road winds down around a series of hills, as you can see in the next photo.
Getting closer to Death Valley and the real desert, as those lovely rocky hills in the distance demonstrate.
One of the little roadside stops along the way offered this sign for our edification. Most of these are attached to a dirt road that bumps its way off towards the hills, which look a lot like the ones you see two photos down. I've never journeyed down them to see the ruins, but perhaps some day I'll visit Death Valley in a vehicle more appropriate for dirt roads, and check them all out.
An older version of the machine-produced one above. They are displayed side by side, and demonstrate some impressive leaps in metal-stamping technology between 1992 and 2001.
A shot from a moving car, hence the blurry bushes in the foreground. (It wasn't that windy.) Click this one to see it much larger.
Another of the signs along the highway, marked by a paved turn out and a dusty road bumping off to nowhere. Click to see it at a legible size.
Now this is Death Valley. This shot is from the road up to Artist Palette, looking down the valley towards the salt flats. The ground, rocky as it is here, is actually more covered in plant life than I've ever seen, in Death Valley. Late 2004 and early 2005 was the wettest season in the park's recorded history. All that water led to "once in a lifetime" flower blooms and plant growth, and while all of the flowers were murdered by the summer months of 120+ degree (49+ Celsius) temperatures and zero precipitation, their stalks remained everywhere, giving a faint yellowish tinge to the ground. Click for a larger view.
There is water in Death Valley though, and not just during freak winter storms. There are several natural springs, with water flowing up from the aquifers that also supply Palm Springs and Las Vegas (though they're dropping, and how much longer they'll last with the huge population growth in the desert remains to be seen) and these produce pockets of lush greenery. There's even a golf course in Furnace Creek, the largest town area of the park, where we stayed. This shot is from the balcony of our hotel room.
This is from the same spot as the previous photo; I've just zoomed in a bit. It's very surreal walking around there, with trees and grass below you, and these sorts of Martian landscapes in the background. It often seems like a movie set, with these huge matte paintings in the background. Click for a larger view.
There's even a horse corral right by the Furnace Creek Ranch, with rides around the oasis area for reasonable fees. I don't think they do any desert rides though, out on the real trails and such. Their shit would lie there forever, for one thing.
Another view from our hotel, out over the date palms and the golf course. The trees are pepper trees, according to my mom, and they look quite lush and verdant, despite going eight or nine months a year without any water. They must send deep roots to get at pockets of it underground, since there aren't any away from the oasis area of the park.
Artists Palette (no, it's not "Artist's Palette," though it seems like it outta be) is winding road that runs away from the main highway and up through some hills and canyons. It passes lots of great hiking spots and beautiful scenery, before hitting its high point in this spot. Here you see the palette itself, a series of hills that seem to be splashed with color, like an artist's palette. They are formed from various mineral deposits; iron, mica, manganese, and so on. You'll see a better shot of this area at the end of this photo grouping. Click for a larger view.
The weather in Death Valley is actually quite nice in the fall and spring. We were there in late November 2005, and the daytime highs were in the 70s, with chilly nights in the high 40s. (approximately 7-23 Celsius) It feels cooler than it is there since the air is so dry and free of humidity; you can be sweating in the sun and walk into a canyon and start to shiver in five minutes in the shade. The nice weather and long, lightly-trafficked, and largely flat roads bring out lots of long distance bicyclists. This is one of two tandem bikes we saw, both with a man/woman couple riding. Each had numerous water bottles and seemed in fine spirits. These two were working their way along the road up to Artist Palette.
Another shot from near Artists Palette, just looking up at any of the millions of small mountains in the area. What makes this sort of desert landscape beautiful to me is the variety of rock colors, with the browns, grays, beiges, and more. The rock is generally very crumbly in Death Valley, and there must have been tremendous damage done by all of the record winter rains. Click for a larger view.
A zoomed view of the landscape seen above. The smooth hill there is all crumbled gravel type stuff, washed down from the rocks above. I particularly like the long, slithering tracks that falling boulders make when they break off and go tumbling and sliding down. It can't happen more than every few decades, but the tracks they make last for years and years.
Here's another view of the tracks left by various falling boulders. This hill is probably a kilometer high, from base to peak, and that track down is easily wide enough to stand in, and probably about knee-deep. It's about a kilometer from my location to the base, as the crow flies. You'd probably have to cover 2-3x that distance to get there though, since you'd be winding around countless hills and walking up deep erosion channels. I didn't hike out to it, though I desperately wanted to. I'm zooming in quite a bit in this photo, so the scale and distance is difficult to judge, as is so often the case in the desert.
There are a lot of gorgeous cliffs and canyons on Artists Palette Drive. I like the sun-washed oranges and pinks in this one. Click it to see it much larger and much more looming. The near hill, in the center and to the left, is maybe 100 meters away. The taller one behind it is probably 2 or 3 kilometers distant. It's hard to judge the distances even in person, and flattened in a photo makes it worse. Click for a larger view.
There's a canyon in the first dip in Artists Palette Drive, and it's one that mom and I have long loved to trek up. Unfortunately, it suffered quite a bit of damage in the winter rains, and a lot of the house-sized (literally) boulders must have broken up and washed downstream. There were tons (literally) of broken rocks there now, most of them couch-sized, but the huge stony, canyon-choking walls of rock, all of them at least as high as a one-story building, were largely gone. Here's a shot of mom standing atop one of the remaining walls, and even that boulder is tiny, compared to the ones that were there in the past. Click for a larger view.
A shot of what the crumbled, rocky slopes look like. Not a speck of greenery on any of them, and most are made up of rocks large enough to be called boulders in most parts of the world. Mom's a good 6 or 7 meters down the hill from me, and the larger rocks you see in this jumble, such as the orange one to the left, are about the size of a couch cushion.
Further up the canyon I beheld this ominous view. You don't notice it on the way up, when you walk beneath it, but when you're coming back down after the canyon ends in a dry waterfall, you can't help but notice it. And gulp, like the coyote in an old Roadrunner cartoon. The crack begins at least 30 meters up, and continues for a good 30 meters more. There's no telling if it goes all the way through this hillside, or when it's going to fall, but it will all come crashing down, millions of tons of rock, someday. It's hard to judge the scale, but if you were to climb up there, you could easily squeeze into the crack. It's a good meter across, up near the top, and the whole leaning section has to be five or six stories high.
Another interesting view on the way down. That boulder fell from hundreds of meters up and somehow stuck there, thousands and thousands of years ago. Since then the hillside has eroded away beneath it, and someday the rock will drop. I wouldn't count on it happening anytime soon though; that stone is easily larger than an SUV, and that hillside is relatively rocky and slow-eroding.
The pink rock canyon ends here, at least for me. This dry waterfall is perhaps 5 or 6 meters high, has no hand or footholds, is way too wide to climb it like a chimney, and is actually more than vertical. You could easily do it with rock pitons and a rope, but that's more gear than I bring on my canyon hikes. I don't think climbing this would get you much further though, check out the close up of the hole and you'll see another huge boulder behind it. I think it's mostly straight up from there, as the canyon gives way to steep cliffs you could not safely climb without ropes and other gear. The walk to the end is fun though, since it's up a hallway-wide, fifty foot high channel, like the location of a deadly shootout or ambush in some old Western.
And here's the money shot of Artists Palette, from the parking area. The long, brown slope to the back right is the one featured in an earlier close up shot, with the boulder tracks winding down it. You can walk around on these hills too; they're very soft and crumbly and almost clay-like, even when dry. In fact, they're almost like sand dunes or gravel pits; you can run right down the sides of them. It's not recommended though, since your boots leave quite a track when you do, and it'll probably take a century for enough hillside to erode and enough rain to fall to cover your tracks. Click for a larger view.
Surprisingly, there is a luxury resort in Furnace Creek, in the heart of Death Valley. It's called the Furnace Creek Inn, and these are part of the grounds, with the valley looking towards Badwater and the salt flats in the distance. We stayed at the Furnace Creek Ranch, a 220 room hotel with multiple two-story buildings, and a price about 1/6th that of the cheapest rooms in this place.
Another one of those, "That background isn't real!" type photos that abound in Death Valley. The background hills here are actually quite unremarkable; little more than piles of gravel, but set behind the grass and palm trees they provide an odd contrast.
From the lower lawn looking up towards part of the sprawling resort. The lawn is easily large enough to host a good game of football, or a wedding, with that gazebo the centerpiece.
Yes, of course there's a pool. One of the nicer features of it are the two fireplaces, one on each side. The water is naturally very warm as it comes out of the ground, so it's quite comfortable even on a cold night. And when you get out you can throw on your robe and stand near the crackling fire. It certainly sounds lovely, and if the hotel weren't around $500 per room, we could have stayed there and experience it ourselves.
As with all oases, you'll hit desert and stone in any direction. This shot is looking out from the balcony outside the Inn's dining room, across the road and over the parking lot. If there weren't palm fronds in the foreground, would you wouldn't believe there was a tree within a hundred miles? Those Stonehengesque pillars of stone are natural, if you're wondering. Just some odd remnants of harder stone that remained when the hill around them eroded away.
A shot from the balcony back into the dining room, where we were enjoying a four-course, $56 dollar Thanksgiving turkey feast. That's the back of mom's head on the left, just beside the blue-shirted waiter, and the front of Glenn, my stepdad. He's dapper as always, in black with a bolo tie.
Thanksgiving dinner was served at late lunch time, and afterwards we toured the grounds and took lots of pictures. Sunset came at last, and it was gorgeous, with the long expanse of flat desert leading up to the distant mountains (they're about 2 kilometers high), and the pink clouds above. Unfortunately, my camera and photographic skills were not able to do them anything resembling justice, which is why there's just one photo here, out of the dozens I clicked.
Scotty's Castle was built in the 1920s, by Albert Johnson, a rich man from Chicago who vacationed there and in Los Angeles, and was managed and eventually named after by Scotty, an eccentric old desert coot of the type you always hear about in old stories. It's been a museum and historical site for decades, and is preserved in its original state, with even the clothing in the closets and furniture and carpets and such. The only way in is on a guided tour, and it's an interesting stop.
A view up the hill to Scotty's grave.
Construction was still underway when the stock market crashed and Mr. Johnson lost his fortune. He killed his wife around the same time, rolling his sports car while driving back to LA from DV and throwing her from the vehicle. After that he lost his taste for the vacation home, and ended up selling it off for almost nothing, to a charitable trust. It's a pity he didn't last long enough to finish the pool, since it would have been a gorgeous bathing experience. There's just as much pool on the other side as you see here, with that bridge structure in the center and space below it to swim through or sit down, almost like a pool bar. The other end is much deeper, so they must have done more excavation on it before work stopped. If you take the behind the scenes tour you see huge stacks of tiles in an old storeroom, ordered for the pool and never installed.
It's hard to make out here, but this black thing is actually a bumblebee. There isn't much insect life in Death Valley, other than ants, but for whatever reason there are huge, black and dark blue honeybees around Scotty's Castle. Why they are black/blue, and if that's a common color mutation for bumblebees in deserts is beyond my knowledge.
Ubehebe Crater is a big hole in the ground that's doubly-misnamed. First of all, it's a crater, but not a meteor crater, as most people assume. It's a volcanic feature, formed by an eruption of molten magma. Secondly, "ubehebe" doesn't mean anything in the local Native American dialects, though it was long reputed to mean "big basket." It's just a word some white man made up long ago, assigned a meaning to, and stuck on it. It is about the coolest thing to see in all of Death Valley though, if you've got the legs for some climbing. The temperature is around 70 at the time of this photo, which was taken around noon. Why is everyone in jackets then? The wind is incredible here, always blowing from the distant mountains and gusting up through the bowl. You can almost leap forward and fly backwards here, and it would be an incredible place to fly a kite, if it didn't rip your arm off. Click for a larger view.
The hike down is a blast, and can be done at a full run in maybe 60 seconds, either here or over to the side, where there is no trail and the slope is that much steeper. It's basically like downhill skiing in your boots, or running down the side of a huge pile of gravel. Your eyes water, your feet slide half a meter with every step, and it's about the most fun you can have this side of snowboarding. The hike up is a killer though, with the steep hill and slippery footing making it at least ten times slower than the descent. You slide back half a step for every step you take, and basically have to aim every step for someone else's footprint, to get any traction at all. I've run down into it every time I've visited Death Valley, and had trudged back up the long trail each time. This time I felt more adventurous though, and climbed up the back wall, over those orange stones. More on that in a bit. Click for a larger view.
Probably my favorite photo of the whole Death Valley trip. Click it to see it much larger. The lunar landscape aspect of things is marred by the greenery, which sprouted up in great profusion after last winter's rains.
I love the images on these signs. They're planted every few hundred meters, all the way around, usually in places where the edge isn't a sharp drop, but more of a gentle slope that soon turns slippery and much less gentle. Ironically, those places aren't so dangerous; you can literally just run down the side of this hole, since it's not much different than a giant mound of gravel. The dangerous part is the far side, where the sandstone type rock is all eroded. You could fall a good 10 or 15 meters straight down in a few places there, and if you did fall from the top you'd likely arrive at the bottom dead, and with many, many broken bones -- assuming you didn't get hung up in a narrow spot on the way down. I climbed up the backside of the crater, straight up those orange rocks, and it was a hell of a fun trek, and rather scary too, as steep and slippery as the rocks were. More on that a few photos further down this page.
A shot from the far side of the crater. The parking lot is to the left of the large path, after it curves right near the top of the climb. This is about where I ended my climb up the side, sweating, scratched of fingers, and quite exhilarated. Click for a larger view.
A view of the steep orange rocky part, taken from the left side. This gives you a good view of where I climbed up; I went up the highest gravelly spike, then more or less straight up the hill, using the ravines as best I could. In retrospect, this was a very poor strategy, since it's far easier to climb up in the erosion grooves, most of which were easily wide enough to walk in. The hard part about this climb is the slippery, crumbly soil, which is hard dirt, studded everywhere with finger-sized rocks. It's grippy, but can't be trusted not to slide and disintegrate beneath your boots. I should have just picked a deep ravine and gone up it the whole way, though those deeper ones often require some tough vertical climbing, when you run into boulders and 2 or 3 meter sheer drops/ascents. Plus, since I went straight up I came out over to the left in this shot, and had to scramble up the last fifteen or twenty meters of very steep, very slippery cinders, risking a slide back down to the orange rock. I was literally pulling on the weeds and scrub plants for traction, like a cartoon character on the edge of a cliff. Click for a larger view.
Glenn and mom enjoyed a hike around the rim as well, and meet me almost halfway, having started off in the other direction. The crater is to the right here, with Little Hebe off to the left.
If you hike around the big crater, you'll discover "Little Hebe Crater" off behind it and to the right. You can see the trail running down to it, and if you squint and/or click the photo to see it larger, you'll see two people walking along the rim on this side, just about smack dab in the center of the photo. I have never bothered to run down to it and check, but I'd estimate that the little one is about three hundred yards across, and maybe fifty yards deep. Little Hebe is just what it sounds like, a smaller version of the big one, created by the same volcanic processes, but apparently several million years more recent. There are several other small craters within a few miles of this spot. And yes, "Little Hebe" sounds like an anti-Semitic slur. Sorry about that.
The view away from the crater isn't quite as interesting, but in this one, looking away from the parking lot with the crater behind me, you can see how massive the eruption was, with the ground blackened by cinders for miles in every direction. It's usually even more lunar surface in appearance, but the floods last winter caused all that yellow grassy stuff to spring up. Click for a larger view.
The cinders did not blow out in every direction evenly. Here's a shot from the back, looking off towards the distant mountains. Some of the gray cinders made it here; you can see them on the ground at the bottom left of the photo, but most blew in the other direction. Click for a larger view.
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