California, Death Valley: Hot, Desolate and Salty with a Golf Course

California marked the 14th and last state that we visited in the United States during our three months there during the summer of 2007. We started having mixed feelings about our time in the US; on one hand, we were happy to explore additional new areas that neither of us had seen before, but, on the other hand, we were feeling the need for a change of scenery and pace, something that we would definitely get in the South Pacific when we made the voyage there after California. The first of three destinations in our last state was the infamous Death Valley; the other two places we would be visiting included Mojave Desert and Los Angeles.

We had both heard and read about many things concerning Death Valley and our safety inside the large national park. Besides the obvious heat issues (Death Valley is the hottest place in the United States), we had heard horror stories of rattlesnakes, scorpions and tarantulas, expecting to see them everywhere we stepped. Just to ease your concern for us, we wanted to let you know up front that we didn't see any such creatures, even though we secretly hoped for some kind of a run-in with something rather deadly!

Badwater Pool was filled year-round with ancient water that began as Ice Age snow and rain hundreds of miles away in the mountains of central Nevada

The heat in Death Valley on the day we visited was somewhat mild compared to what we were expecting. With average temperatures in the summer reaching the 120 degree Fahrenheit (around 50 degrees Celsius!) range, we expected to be sweltering and dripping with sweat as soon as we stepped out of our air conditioned SUV, which we had rented for our southwest USA road trip, to take photos inside the national park. Funnily enough, we were really disappointed with the weather because the temperature only reached a high of 113 degrees Fahrenheit (45 degrees Celsius). Since the heat outside was an extremely dry heat, we didn't feel any hotter than we had felt in Arkansas earlier in the summer, or in southeast Asia at the start of the year.

When we entered Death Valley National Park from the east, after driving from Las Vegas across southern Nevada and around Area 51, the temperature outside was only in the mid 90s Fahrenheit (around 34 degrees Celsius). During the drive into Death Valley, we descended a few thousand feet in elevation and watched the temperature gauge on our vehicle increase every few minutes, reaching the peak temperature when we were at the bottom of the valley at an elevation just below sea level. We arrived in the national park late in the afternoon, so the temperature was milder than it would have been if we made it there at midday. That was another factor in determining our feelings that the weather in Death Valley was not much of a brute force.

There were many sights to see inside Death Valley since the park was huge, covering a large portion of southeastern California. Our arrival in the afternoon meant that we had to choose one section of the park to explore; we chose to drive through the middle of the park, heading towards the bottom exit at highway 127, which we wanted to take south towards Baker, a small town at the junction of highway 127 and Interstate 15. Baker was also where we planned to spend the night and start our journey towards Mojave Desert the following day. We found the national park entrance at Daylight Pass after driving through the Utah town of Beatty and stopping for a few minutes at the ghost town of Rhyolite.

There were several places inside Death Valley where we stopped our SUV and took photos of the interesting and unique landscape. Despite there not being much foliage inside the park, we were still amazed by the beauty of the place. The points of interest that we chose to spend more time at were Golden Canyon, Devil's Golf Course and Badwater Basin. The latter included the Badwater Pool and Salt Flats areas, but was no less impressive than the two other places.

At Golden Canyon, we chose to do our only long hike of the day. When we parked our car, it was around 5:00pm and 112 degrees Fahrenheit. The hike was meant to be about a mile one way and a mile coming back. There were a few other people in the area, but it was pretty quiet overall. At the last minute, Dan thought to grab a bottle of water from the car, which was a good thing with the heat and sun blaring down on us (even though we still thought that the heat was completely bearable). A few minutes into our hike, we asked a couple of guys if they would take our photo inside the canyon. They acquiesced and we started chatting with them afterwards since they were heading in the same direction as we were.

The two guys were from Germany and were brothers; one of them worked in Los Angeles and the other had come to the US for the summer holiday between terms at his university. They were doing a short road trip of their own to Las Vegas and Utah and knew people who were organising parties in Las Vegas during the MTV Music Awards; no doubt they would likely run into many celebrities and have a great time there!

After the hike, we hopped back into our SUV and drove to Devil's Golf Course. Our German friends were also at that next stop and we walked around the area for a few minutes. There, crystallised salts, deposited by ancient salt lakes, composed the jagged formations of the forbidding landscape; the salt crystals there were forever changing as they were shaped by wind and the little rain that reached the area. The ground in front of us was very rugged and walking on the salt formations was very difficult.

When we had finished our 18 holes of golf (haha), we drove to Badwater Basin, 282 feet below sea level. The Germans chose to do another hike so we never saw them again, but during that drive, we did spot a coyote, which we thought was more interesting and important than seeing the Germans again. At Badwater Basin, we first stopped to look at Badwater Pool, one of the only water sources inside Death Valley. The water there got its name when a surveyor mapping the area led his mule to the edge of the water to take a drink, and the mule politely declined. The water was not poisonous, though, just very salty.

Badwater Pool was filled year-round with ancient water that began as Ice Age snow and rain hundreds of miles away in the mountains of central Nevada. The runoff seeped into porous limestone bedrock and began a long underground flow through a regional aquifer. It then emerges at Badwater Pool, where salts dissolve from old deposits and float to the surface, making the spring water "bad" and thus causing the mule to decline his drink.

Next to Badwater Pool was the expansive area of the Salt Flats. We learned that the vast, surreal salt flats changed constantly as the salt crystals expanded, pushing the crust of salt into rough, chaotic forms. Newly formed crystals oozed between mudcracks, sketching strange patterns on the surface of the salt flats, which we observed when walking around them. We had been impressed with the salt flats in northwestern Utah, but the ones in Death Valley were different and more impressive than the ones we had seen earlier in the week.

Another thing we learned at the salt flats was that passing rainstorms washed off windblown dust and generated a fresh layer of blinding white salt. Also, floods created temporary lakes that dissolved salts back into solution, starting the process all over again. All of this information was taken from the sign at the Salt Flats area, which you can read if you ever make it there. We knew that Death Valley was going to be a large place, but when we found out that the floor of the valley covered 9000 square miles, an area larger than the state of New Hampshire, we were awestruck with the enormity of the natural wonder.

As we drove out of the park, we decided to take a shortcut where highway 178 split, just before Jubilee Pass. We paid little heed to the fact that the "shortcut" on the map was marked as a dotted line instead of a solid one. Anyway, since we were driving an SUV, we thought we might as well put it to the test; also, we had driven down a dotted line road to see Devil's Golf Course (although that road was only a few miles long) and the car handled the gravel and dirt road quite well. Bearing in mind that it was starting to get dark, and that we wanted to get to Baker as quickly as possible, we started driving along the gravel road in high spirits with much optimism.

It didn't take long for us to regret our choice of road, nor to begin to become a little bit frightened. Once we had started driving along the road, we couldn't really return back to the main road because we would have lost valuable time; however, we hadn't factored in the time we lost by only driving 15-20 miles per hour when the road conditions got worse and worse. The first few minutes on the road were actually fine; our vehicle was moving along quite nicely regardless of the bumps. Soon after, we came upon the first of many points in the road where flash floods had washed the road out, where we had to move along the road at a crawling speed to avoid hitting a boulder in the road or popping one of the SUVs tires (we know that tyres is the correct English spelling, but we were trying to appease the Americans reading our US travel stories by writing it as "tires").

The middle of the desert at night time was so extraordinarily dark, we couldn't believe our eyes. That night, there was no moon in the sky and, even with thousands of stars lighting up the canvas above us, we didn't have much light to go by, except for that which was coming from our headlights. We ended driving on the 45 mile "shortcut" road for over two hours; during that time, we saw a few rabbits along the side of the road and some desert mice, but that was it with regards to living creatures.

When we finally made it out of Death Valley, with massive grins on our faces, having survived the shortcut, we arrived in Baker an hour later and found somewhere to stay for the night. From the outside, The Royal Hawaiian looked like a motel straight out of the 1970s and, on the inside, it was a motel straight out of the 1970s, with long shag carpet on the floor, wood panels on the walls, and furniture that had to have been requisitioned from the set of The Brady Bunch (even the old dial telephone). Seriously. It would be worth staying there a night just to see what we are talking about... or you can look at the photo in our photo album to see for yourself.

That night, after we checked into our hip and swanky digs at The Royal Hawaiian, we drove across the street, literally, to a Denny's diner, where we had something to drink and eat whilst writing some travel stories. We shared food again, a chicken fried chicken ciabatta sandwich with fries, and we each had a large glass of chocolate milk and a couple of fruit juices after the meal. It's a good thing that we didn't have coffee there; one of the other customers found a cockroach in theirs - disgusting!