Hot spot
DEATH VALLEY NATIONAL PARK – Hottest. Lowest. Driest. Those words describe Death Valley, but leaving it at that is like describing chocolate merely as brown. You have to taste this storied slice of the California desert to understand its calling. Taste it with your eyes, your skin, your ears, your mind.
For the eyes, there are sights you’ll see nowhere else on the planet: salt-crusted badlands 200 feet below sea level, walled in by mountains reaching more than 11,000 feet high. Sand dunes, marble canyons, volcanic craters, dirt tracks leading to ruined mines.
Some of the geologic formations – the sea-green and violet pinnacles of Artist’s Palette, for example, or the striated sandstone ridges at Zabriskie Point – are so one-of-a-kind they’ll stay forever wedged in your mind.
Nor will you forget the way that, at dawn, the sun creeps in like a paintbrush, washing the valley with color, one crenelated mountain wall at a time.
The air in Death Valley is so clear it seems like it could shatter, and so oxygen-saturated that just breathing imparts a noticeable measure of vigor.
For the skin, there are other sensory pleasures – or tortures, depending.
In summer, when most tourists come (“That’s when most people have vacation time,” a park ranger shrugged when I asked why), the heat is like an anvil, pressing down on everything, all the time. It won’t let you up, day or night, even for a minute.
Daytime highs of 120 degrees are common; at night it seldom dips below 90. The tanks of radiator water strategically located alongside the park’s steepest roads weren’t put there just for fun.
Winter is the best time to appreciate Death Valley’s wonders. Temperatures then are so pleasant – low 60s in the daytime, low 40s at night – you’ll wonder how on earth the place got such a foreboding name.
Early spring and late fall are comfortable, too, with cool nights and tolerably warm days.
For the ears, Death Valley has something most of us don’t often experience: silence. Dead, absolute silence – or at least, the absence of man-made sound.
Some visitors are frightened by this. They’re the ones you see getting out of their cars and standing there with the door open and the radio on, terrified of solitude.
Far better to embrace it. Cell phones don’t work here, and the few so-called Internet “hot spots” aren’t so hot.
But being off the grid has its advantages. It gives you time to think, for one thing. And there’s lots to contemplate in Death Valley, especially in terms of those who came before.
The Timbisha Shoshone claimed the valley first, only to be pushed out by pioneers, gold seekers and borax entrepreneurs.
Eccentrics loomed large. One who left an indelible mark was Walter Scott, a stunt rider in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show who conned a wealthy Chicago businessman into building him a castle – now a tourist attraction – in this unlikely spot.
It’s all here, and more. So don’t be put off by your preconceptions. Think of a visit as an adventure, and it will be.
Death Valley is one of the best “drive through” parks in the country. You can easily spend several days just cruising from one natural wonder to another.
Because of the heat, you’ll want to do much of your sightseeing early and late in the day. Don’t miss sunrise at Zabriskie Point, just a 10-minute drive from the Furnace Creek Village tourist complex. Sunset there is spectacular, too, with a different part of the landscape lit up.
Another sunrise-sunset hot spot is the Mesquite Flat Dunes complex (also called Death Valley Dunes) near Stovepipe Wells, where you can ditch your shoes, climb and play to your heart’s content.
If you have just one day and aren’t up for much hiking, base yourself at either the centrally located Furnace Creek Ranch or the nearby Furnace Creek Inn.
Start early in the morning with the three-mile drive to Zabriskie Point, take in the view and continue another three miles to 20-Mule Team Canyon, where one of the best scenic drives in the park leads past a jaw-dropping panorama of bizarre, deeply eroded badlands pocked with mining tunnels burrowed by borax prospectors.
Backtrack to Furnace Creek and drive 20 miles south on Highway 178 to Badwater, the lowest point in North America at 282 feet below sea level. A boardwalk leads visitors onto the white-as-snow salt pan.
On the way back, have a look at Devil’s Golf Course, an eerie flat covered in lumps and spires of crystalline salts.
Then explore the nine-mile Artist’s Drive, a one-way, roller-coaster road weaving through colorful rock formations including Artist’s Palette, where minerals stain the rocks astonishing shades of green, yellow, blue and pink.
You can do all that before lunch, which you can eat at any of five restaurants (some open seasonally) in the Furnace Creek area. Afterward, bone up on Death Valley history and geology at the Death Valley Museum in the national park visitor center and the nearby Borax Museum.
In late afternoon, make a side trip to Harmony Borax Works, where an interpretive trail explains how the “white gold of the desert” was mined and processed.
Stovepipe Wells, a secondary tourist center, is 20 miles up the road. Just past its motel/gas station complex is Mosaic Canyon, where you’ll want to hike in to see walls of pure marble striated in hues of off-white, gray, brown and rose.
Then drive back to the Mesquite Flat Dunes for some frolicking in the sand at the end of the day.
Add a day or two and you’ll fall more completely under Death Valley’s spell.
A tour of Scotty’s Castle, a historic 1920s mansion 50 miles northwest of Furnace Creek, can be combined with a stop at Ubehebe Crater, a spectacular volcanic pit smeared with vibrant color.
You’ll need a high-clearance vehicle to explore Titus Canyon, with its spectacular view and rock formations, and Racetrack Playa, a dry lake bed where boulders wiggled by the winds of time have left long, mysterious tracks in the earth.
Beyond these well-known sites lie ghost towns, the ruins of old mines and a thousand and one other places where you most likely will be the only visitor.
If you’re like most people who get this far, Death Valley will draw you back again and again.