And now we move on to Death Valley. By this time we have crossed over into California. Death Valley looks a lot like Mars, or what I would imagine Mars to look like. Dry and gray. We could drive for miles without seeing anyone. There aren't any trees, nothing green, everything is a dusty brown or grey color. When we were there it was probably somewhere around 105 degrees. It's pretty unnerving to drive a couple hundred miles without seeing any water or shade. Once you're inside the park, you drive through the valley with 2 large mountain ranges on either side. The mountains are just piles of rock, no plants of any sort are growing on them. The valley is mostly salt, which gives of a bright white glow. We saw the mirages of water multiple times, I guess due to the heat.
The first landmark we stopped at was Badwater Basin. It's 282 feet below sea level. There is a small pond of water that's pretty nasty looking.
In the middle of this picture is the "Sea Level" sign.
This is all the water left in Death Valley.
We also did a 2 mile hike through some mountains in Death Valley. It was a cool idea to hike in Death Valley, but it ended up being pretty uneventful. We found out the hike doesn't actually take you to any place special. So what's the point of the hike? I want some kind of reward at the end, not just another mountain.
This is what we hiked through
This is Devil's Gold Course. It's salt piles that are hard as rocks. They constantly change in shape and size so if you google pictures of it it'll look totally different.
As we were driving along we saw a man jogging along the side of the road. No other vehicles around, no stores, no people, just a man jogging. It was so shocking it was almost like he was a mirage. After we had checked in to our hotel we drove to Ubehebe Crater. On the way there we saw the man STILL jogging. This is like 2 or 3 hours later in the day. Some people are in to strange sports.
On the way to Ubehebe Crater we drove through some small mountains that were black sand. We drove around and around, then all the sudden we peaked at the top of a hill and drove up on this:
A half mile wide, 500 foot deep crater. The parking lot is literally on the edge of this crater. And we have driven for about 45 minutes without seeing anything living. It was freaky.
These sand dunes were right by our hotel, our spider infested, very creepy, hotel. Jordan got some really good pictures of them the next morning at sunrise.
I think that concludes our Death Valley tour. Next stop is Manzanar Japanese relocation camp and Mt. Whitney.
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