Park 47 Reprise: Death Valley (Part 2)

1/3/15. Last summer, Jason, Catherine and I traveled through the western part of Death Valley (the Panamint Valley area) but we gave up going any further because of the extreme heat and our worries that Catherine's car wouldn't make it up the mountain range without overheating. We promised ourselves that we would return to Death Valley from the Nevada side.

I'm thrilled to say that today we got to do that! We took a full-day tour out of Las Vegas so that we could enjoy the day without driving or navigating and it was a great choice. We left early in the morning and spent the entire day until dark in the park. It was a scenic tour so we stopped at many places and got to see a great variety of geological formations that were amazing, alien, and overwhelming. It was truly incredible!

We started at Dantes View which is a high point on the eastern edge and has a view of the entire canyon. There are no words to describe the scale of the park.

Next we drove down towards the valley and stopped at the Twenty-Mule Team Canyon that was filled with badlands where Borax had once been mined. I had never seen anything like this so it was absolutely fascinating. The ground was soft and covered with a hard crust -- like at the beach after a rain. We climbed to the top of one of the mounds to get a view of the badlands.

We drove into the valley next and stopped at the an area called "Devil's Golf Course". This had crazy looking salt crystals that were "floating" on top of an underground lake. The salt leaches up from below. The rocks were hard and very sharp. We were warned not to try to walk on them.

We then stopped a few other places, including Furnace Creek for lunch. The temperature was just around freezing when we left Las Vegas but in the valley it rose to about 60 degrees. We were able to shed our coats and enjoy the clear sunshine.

Next we went to the Badwater Basin which has the lowest elevation in North America. Here the salt flats have dried up and curled into patterns across the land.

After that we stopped at the Devil's Cornfield that had rows of desert plants across a wide plain.

It was now late afternoon and we spent a short while playing in the Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes. These looked like Hollywood kinds of desert sand dunes and the sand was extremely fine and powdery having been blow here through the mountain pass. The sand was soft as quiet as we walked on it and it clung to everything. Truly remarkable views!

We left the park and made one more stop at the Rhyolite ghost town on our way home. The sun was setting and there was a full moon that beautifully lit up the sky. What an amazing adventure!