Death Valley National Park

Big, hot and empty.
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We only had the morning to experience Death Valley as a long journey awaited us the other side of midday. The Mesquite Sand Dunes were first on our itinerary. A few square miles of dunes, some as high as 150ft, in the middle of the valley, and looking like they don’t belong there they were a beautiful sight. The boys loved scrambling up them on all fours and then running down the other side, arms windmilling as they ran. What struck Sam and I was the silence. With absolutely zero background noise in the area sound seemed to travel much easier, it felt as if we had super-hearing. Talking normally on different dunes about 150 yards apart we could hold conversations with the boys, it was quite eerie (well I say ‘conversations’, it was more along the lines of “Can you hear me?”, “Yes, can you hear me?”, “Yes, can you hear me NOW?”.........etc).

Mesquite sand dunes.
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The next journey took us around a short car tour called the Artist’s Trail and a short stop at the Artist’s Palette so called because oxidisation of various metals has created rocks of amazing colour, yellow, red, purple, green and blue. Photo ops abound.

Finally, as the temperature started to rise quickly we took two short stops at the Badwater basin, the lowest point in the USA which is over 200ft below sea level where you could walk along the crunchy white salt flats which stretch across the valley, and then The Devil’s Golf course where you could walk, stepping carefully (or bounding carelessly in the boys case) between thousands of uneven salt formations, which were rock hard and just dying to trip you up and knock your teeth out.

Aftermath of the paint fight.
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By the time we left Death Valley, it was 94 degrees and rising and so we left for Cedar City in Utah, a five hour drive away, with a brief stop in Las Vegas (which is really ugly in the daylight) to swap our piece of garbage hire car. By the time we had got to our destination in our new piece of garbage hire car it was 55 degrees cooler which I thought was an amazing change in temperature, but as usual the rest of my family just sneered at me.