For: Hikers and drivers, NOT for people who are easily sunburned or dehydrated
Scenery: Rocks, hills, and canyons with warm, earthy color tones
Time spent: 2 days
Visiting season: Winter-Spring
Great for: A change of pace, away from the ritz & glitz of Vegas
Whenever I talk about going to visit some remote place in a desert, most people immediately ponder to themselves, “What could possibly be there that’s worth visiting?” Truthfully, I believe that the desert is a beautiful region of California that is extraordinarily unappreciated. In Death Valley alone, there’s enough to see to warrant spending two days here. The two regions covered in this post were spread across two days, in two different years, and I still haven’t seen it all. FYI I consider Highway 190 and Daylight Pass Rd to be the main roads that split Death Valley into the northern and southern region.
Southern Death Valley
Of course, the desert is not only quite far away from most civilization, but also immensely hot in the summer. It is not unusual for regions in Death Valley to hit 115-120 degrees in the summertime. I learned that lesson the hard way once upon a time, which is why I planned the first visit in this post for early January 2009. Well, the best laid plans often go awry. It was a bearable 80-85 degrees with a high UV index. I didn’t bring sunblock. You can probably fill in the rest if you read the title.
Nonetheless, it was a very pleasant drive on Highway 95 from Las Vegas north towards Beatty, then bearing southwest in the town of Beatty onto NV-374, which brings you directly into Death Valley’s Stovepipe Wells region via Daylight Pass. Many of the parks more easily accessible destinations are south of this point. The first attraction we visited in the park was the Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes. These dunes are nothing special, not particularly tall or expansive, except for their intricate line formations (which you can see if you walk out a ways) and the soft, fine sand.
A little ways west of the dunes is a 2.4 mile long gravel road that leads up to the base of Mosaic Canyon.
You can walk up the canyon a little bit and see the strange polished marble, almost like a diamond in the rough. Take care with your footing as you go, the rocks are slick and can be used as slides (intentionally or not), even when dry. It’s up to you how far you walk into the canyon – you can go up to 2 miles – but we decided to cut it short to allow time to explore the southern section of the park.
Back on the main north-south highway, we head towards the Furnace Creek region of the park. Before hitting the luscious Furnace Creek Inn resort, we pass by a little area called the Harmony Borax Works, which was a working Borax refinery for several years in the late 1800′s. Today, only the ruins of some equipment and buildings are left to let you imagine working in such a hot, remote place during the summer.
We continued on to one of the parks very famous attractions, Badwater Basin. The name refers to the water from an adjacent spring, which is undrinkable due to its high salt content. The lowest point in this salt flat is an astounding 282 feet below sea level, making it the lowest point in the continental United States. There are markings on the adjacent cliff to mark where sea level actually is. If you feel adventurous, you can even walk out a bit onto the salt, but be aware that it can be unstable and muddy after rains.
(c) Gary Cheang 2009
To finish off the day in the park, we headed to Zabriskie Point. This is a magnificent piece of nature that I don’t think could be seen anywhere else. It consists of rolling hills that have been shaped by water erosion. The way it looks as the sun casts shadows into the valley is simply breathtaking- a must see feature in the park, even if you have to skip other attractions to do it.
A couple of other notable attractions in the southern region of the park that aren’t pictured are Artist Palette and Dante’s View. Artist Palette is located on Artist Drive, and is a collection of odd colored rocks in the side of a mountain. The colors come from various metals embedded in the rock, and can vary in intensity. Dante’s View is the highest point in Death Valley, and provides a view of the entire Badwater Basin. Be forewarned that you must drive up a steep, winding road to get up to Dante’s View – a road that is closed to anything over 25 feet in length.
Northern Death Valley
This portion of Death Valley was actually explored after I moved into the middle of the Mojave Desert. A group at work decided to take a weekend trip, so a friend and I joined them for a day to see some of the stuff we hadn’t seen yet. We took 178 over the Slate Range towards 190, over Town Pass, and into the park from the west entrance. We met the rest of the group near Furnace Creekand pointed our four truck/SUV caravan north to the main attraction that day, the Racetrack Playa.
The Racetrack is an immensely cool, serene place that many people will never get to visit, because it is 27 miles each way. That doesn’t sound so bad until you realize that the road is (mostly) a low speed, 1.5 lane rutted dirt road filled with sharp rocks that will pummel your kidneys for a couple hours, minimum. A four wheel drive high clearance vehicle is recommended only because conditions can change rapidly, but just high clearance with heavy duty tires will suffice most times. The only really dangerous part is that no tow truck will come fetch you out here, and many people who try this in cars or car-based SUV’s are unprepared for the multiple flat tires due to the sharp rocks. The blind corners and driving up on steep embankments to allow for passing also scares the piss out of some people.
But the long devilish drive is definitely worth it, winding through some beautiful canyons along the way and passing through Teakettle Junction as well. I’m not sure how this junction got started, but it has developed into a collection of kettles from around the world (I noticed one with Korean writing on it). Many people who find out about this little gem bring kettles to leave there.
The Racetrack itself is nothing special to look at – it isn’t particularly eye-catching or breathtaking by traditional standards – but instead relies on its mystique to draw visitors. It is just a large salt playa that has rocks on it. Some of these rocks have long smooth trails behind them, and yet nobody has ever seen them move. The theories on how this happens have grown in recent years, ranging from outrageous to believable. The most believable one I’ve heard is that after a rain, the ground gets soft and susceptible to imprints (this is fact). Then, overnight the temperatures cool rapidly and cause the water to form ice sheets around the rocks. The wind picks up and blows across the ice sheets, and the sheets have just enough surface area to catch the wind and gently slide the rocks across the wet ground.
The road out of Racetrack is the same one that you took in, and leads you back to Ubehebe Crater. This crater was not created by an asteroid but by an imploding volcano. There are actually trails to hike down to the bottom of the crater, but I avoided that only because I dreaded the climb back up (yes I’m lazy). Besides, there’s nothing down there anyway!
After sitting around for a while in the wind, we went off to Scotty’s Castle. The story behind this place is really intriguing and the extended version is told on the tour. This castle in the desert was built in the ’20′s, and it wasn’t owned by Scotty. Scotty was actually a scam artist who tricked the owner, Albert Johnson, into investing in a fake gold mine in Death Valley. Johnson had a health issue that got better when he visited Death Valley, and he happened to really like Scotty. So Johnson let Scotty do as he wanted with the place, letting him supervise construction and tricking people into believing that it belonged to him. As a result of their friendship, the plaques around the castle read SJ DVR – Scotty & Johnson Death Valley Ranch.
The lavish castle actually has some very cool features, such as an interior water fall. There is a built in pipe organ, a power plant specifically built for the castle, a pool that was supposed to surround the castle as a moat (although it was never finished), etc. The tour is worth the money if you want to hear the whole story behind this place. Truthfully though, the inside really isn’t anything stunning, so if you’re not that curious just skip it.
