Death Valley National Park

Death Valley from Aguerrybery point in the Panamints

Story and photos by Len Wilcox

Death Valley is magnificent.  Wildly beautiful, strange, remote, awe-inspiring - it deserves these accolades, and more.  It is seductive.  It is very odd; nothing quite like it exists anywhere else on this continent. Not a thing is on a small scale here; extreme is the name of the game.  The mountains are higher, the valleys are deeper, the temperature is hotter, the vegetation is sparser - whatever a desert can do, Death Valley does it better, or bigger, or more passionately.No one I know ever visits Death Valley exactly twice.  Either people come here, hate it, and never return, or they come back time and again to experience one of the most outrageous places on the face of the earth.

My  quest is to try and understand this oddball place.  

Richard Lingenfelter, in his wonderful book 'Death Valley & The Amargosa', calls this area the land of illusions.  He's right; nature runs amok here.  It is a geographical oddity, one of the hottest places on earth, and one of the most eerily beautiful. 

To call it a valley is like calling Los Angeles a community.  It is a huge and deep valley, 170 miles long and a mile to two miles deep.  It is a land of extremes.  While standing at its lowest point (282 feet below sea level) the majestic peaks of the Panamint Mountains rise nearby to an elevation of more than 11,000 feet - and often are covered with snow.  From a point in the Panamints, looking eastward you can see Badwater in the heart of Death Valley, which is the lowest point in the United States; to the west you can see Mt. Whitney, the highest mountain in the contiguous US. 

Incredibly hot, incredibly strange, and very inhospitable. It is the second hottest place on earth.  It lacks being the hottest by only two degrees; the official record is 134 degrees f. in Death Valley, and 136 degrees in the Libyan Sahara. Yet humans have made Death Valley home for hundreds of years. Native Americans adapted well to the unique environment, usually spending the summer at a camp in the mountains then moving down into the valley for a nice, warm winter.  About a hundred or so of the tribe still live in the valley today.

In the early years of the 20th century, numerous prospectors, scientists, one notable con artist and a semi-retired businessman made Death Valley their home for life.  These people spent many years learning the secrets of this strange land and living lives that were so large they still amaze (and in some cases, amuse) us.  Chinese laborers dug borax from the floor of a dry lakebed, where the surface of the ground reaches as high as 170 degrees.  And of course, thanks to the modern miracle of air conditioning, today several hundred people make Death Valley their home, serving the tourists that come to experience this strange and barren land.

And strange this land is.  There's a place in Death Valley where the rocks move, seemingly on their own.  They leave tracks as they scoot around on a dry lakebed known as The Racetrack.  Scientists say this probably happens when the lake gets a little rain, followed by stiff winds; the rain mixes with the soil of the lakebed, making an extremely slick surface, and the rocks move with the wind.  Either that, or some very big and strong ghosts work here.  No one has ever seen the rocks move; all anyone ever sees is the tracks the rocks leave behind.

Nearby is Ubehebe Crater, a volcano that erupted just an eyeblink ago, in geological time.  Just four thousand years ago there was a massive explosion when rising magma encountered a layer of groundwater, blowing the top off the mountain and leaving a pit a half-mile wide and five hundred feet deep. A smaller crater close to Ubehebe erupted a mere one thousand years ago. 

In the heart of Death Valley there stands a plain known as the Devil's Cornfield.  That's what it looks like, too; stalks of corn bunched together, standing tall, clumped in orderly formations.  The oldest rocks on earth are in the valley - as is a scarp formed during an earthquake just a few years ago.

A geographical oddity, certainly.  It is a land of stark contrasts with the old and new standing side by side.  Plants and animals found nowhere else in the world have adapted to living through the incredible dry heat of a Death Valley summer, and live well in the foul brine of its water.