Death Valley - Sleeping for Free!

We arrived in Death Valley on Good Friday and left on Easter Sunday, which I found a bit ironic. 

Almost as nice as rising from the dead, we got to sleep for free in Emigrant Campground for the weekend.  Emigrant is a tent-only campground on the west end of the park, close to the store and facilities at Stovepipe Wells, and conveniently near a roadside rest stop with flush toilets.  It is a tent-only campsite, which means that the only RVs parked there were rentals driven by Germans and Chinese.


When we arrived, it was almost empty and a wonderfully hot 87º F in the shade.  Had we known how cold we would be in a week's time, we would have likely appreciated the heat a bit more and spent less time worrying about the 12 pounds of frozen salmon in the cooler.

We enjoyed a relaxing afternoon reading and munching on healthy, gluten-free snacks and consuming large quantities of water. 

We watched the campers slowly trickle in, select their spots, and disgorge amazingly large amounts of gear from their vehicles.  By sunset, Emigrant Campground looked like this.

The campground featured the usual suspects.  There were  a couple of middle-aged guys camping on their own, strumming guitars as they waited for the girl of their dreams to drive into the campground and discover them.  As far as possible away from them, there was the lone Japanese female who slept in her car with the doors locked out of fear of the two strange men camped in the opposite corner of the campground.  There was the van-load of Hispanics that most impressed me - how they packed four generations and all that gear into one minivan I will never know.  The Germans that arrived late in their RV, and the Israelis camped next to us with a beautiful Alsatian rounded out the weekend's group.


The next day, I was rewarded with the satisfaction of having filled up the gas tank BEFORE we entered Death Valley.  The price below is per gallon, it would be about $1.53 per litre or just under a Pound Sterling per litre.  To put this in perspective, we filled up at $3.85/gallon, or about $1 or 0.66 pence per litre, and it felt expensive.

Our first stop was a Park Ranger-led walk at Golden Canyon.  We take advantage of these programs every time we visit a national park, as it is both educational and a requirement of our son's Junior Ranger program.  He currently has Junior Ranger badges earned in 12 different parks (Manassas/Bull Run, Vicksburg, Hagerman Fossil Beds, Glacier, Grand Tetons, Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Tuzigoot, Montezuma's Castle, Death Valley, and Zion).  Usually activities are led by a well-educated ranger (often a geologist), and occasionally they are led by someone who has trouble counting the number in the group unless wearing toe-less sandals.  Golden Canyon was led by the former type of Ranger, and we learned quite a bit.

This is what the Golden Canyon trail looks like.  In fact, this is what much of Death Valley looks like once you get off of the featureless plain of the valley floor.

There is a surprising amount of color in the rocks.  It's mostly neutral and earth tone (go figure), but it is there.  A closer inspection shows that much of the rock of Golden Canyon is conglomerate, made up of different types of rock all stuck in mud or clay and then solidified into a new rock, as pictured below.

Our son decides to climb one of the sandstone embankments.  He goes up, and up, and then realizes that sandstone flakes off in you hands in chunks pretty easy, and decides to come down.

A close-up photo shows a few million years of history.  Rain and snow melt on the mountains washes dissolved minerals down onto the valley floor where a lake forms.  It dries out, leaving a layer of salt crystals.  A lot of dust gets blown on top of it and compresses into a layer of sandstone.  Repeat.

We did see this lizard on the hike, and since he never moved as our group tramped by, I assume he was feeling a little ill after a night of eating agave.

A quick drive across Artist's Point....

The next stop comes right out of a B-grade Western movie - Badwater Basin.

This is where all of that "salt water" mentioned above ends up.  As a result, Badwater Basin is a large salt flat - mainly table salt (sodium chloride) and some borax and other minerals thrown in to make sure it is nutritionally complete.  We soon regretted telling our son that it was important to keep salt levels up in the heat....

Once you've licked Badwater Basin, there's only one thing to do for an encore.  Play on the sand dunes!