Desert Sojourn

Death Valley, CA

February 27, 2003

Time to leave San Diego, possibly for the last time! Our plan is to first spend a week or so in Death Valley National Park. It's a good time of year to go there -- cool weather, and perhaps enough recent precipitation that we will see some green plants or even flowers! And, we'd been there once before, just long enough to see how wonderful the night sky can be when one is very distant from city lights.

On the morning of Thursday, 2/27, we packed up all of our stuff, took the dogs for one last walk around Campland, and headed northeast on I-15. We stopped forlunch at the Bun Boy in Baker, home of the World's Tallest Thermometer, certainly an amazing site. The food was, well, acceptable, but filled us up sufficiently to prepare us for heading off the interstate into the desert. Right around that time our odometer clicked over to 60,000.0 miles, which Brian felt absolutely had to be recorded on film. Right then. Right there. Thankfully there was no traffic at the time.

As the sun neared the horizon, we pulled in to the Furnace Creek area of Death Valley, at about 200 feet below sea level. We had hoped to get all the way to Mesquite Springs Campground that night, farther north in the park, but felt that we'd rather get there during the daylight, so we spent the night in the Furnace Creek Campground. This campground was pretty crowded, but gave us a comfortable place to stop for the night. The temperature was cool but comfortable and the surrounding 11,000-foot peaks were snow-capped.

February 28, 2003

Got up early and drove about an hour north to the Mesquite Springs Campground. This lovely little campground is off the beaten path, with only about 30 sites, on the edge of the Death Valley Wash (a "wash" is a dry riverbed -- this is the closest thing they have to water-front property in the valley!). It's at about 2000 feet elevation, so was much cooler than down in the Furnace Creek area, but still quite nice during the days.

We set up camp, cracked a beer, and settled in for a few days of utter relaxation.

Note the dark skies in the picture... Later in the afternoon, a squall blew through, giving us a little bit of rain, and actually even some snow! This snow didn't stick around us, but did add to the surrounding snow-capped peaks. We did not expect to get snow in Death Valley.

March 1-4, 2003

The next few days were spent luxuriously relaxing in the desert, far from the concerns of everyday life. In Death Valley there is no radio, no cell phone service, no internet, no television. We did occasionally turn on our satellite radio to check the status of activities in the Middle East, but other than that we were almost alone in the wilderness.

Our campground was inhabited by more wildlife than human life: ravens, roadrunners, western kingbirds, and coyotes were the most obvious. We didn't see any rattlesnakes or scorpions, though! The ravens were the most interesting to watch: one pair of ravens "owned" the campground, and every time someone left a campsite the two ravens would immediately descend and scour it for scraps. They were also busy making a nest somewhere and were often seen with stuff in their beaks. They were very talkative, with a wide variety of noises and calls.

We took a few hikes from the campground. Nothing too ambitious, since we were in aggressive relaxation mode, but we did hike some distance both up and down the Wash. The rocks and soil were fascinating, with all kinds of erosion and very little vegetation. The dogs liked to hike with us (don't tell the park rangers that we had them off leash outside of our campsite!), and they also liked to play ball with us in the open space of the Wash.

Right around the campground area was some evidence of some past human activity, probably some mining or something, but the evidence was mostly hard to see. Jacque went for a run one morning, following the faint traces of the old mining roads. We also went for a short bike ride one morning. The utter loneliness of the desert could be quite striking when you get away from evidence other people.

We also played a few games of Scrabble on the Travel Scrabble set that we got in our going-away goody bag. We decided that we would enjoy playing if we could enforce a time limit, so we brought along a 3-minute egg timer to keep the pace up. We each won one game. But, we both had to resort to such words as "GHEE" and "SIENNA", which would not have passed challenges! Jacque insists to this day that GHEE is a non-foreign English word meaning "clarified butter". Brian is not convinced, and neither is Mr. Webster. Nor his wife, Miriam. (At least not using the dictionary we brought along for this purpose.)

At the Mesquite Springs campground we met the volunteer "campground hosts", Gary and Dottie. Gary and Dottie are "full-timers", meaning they live full time in their fifth-wheel trailer. They do not have a house anywhere to go back to, although they do have family back in Tennessee. They spend a lot of time volunteering to be campground hosts, which seems like a very pleasant way to spend some time -- they just make sure that everything is OK in the campground, and let the rangers know if anything needs attention. And, they get to stay for free, and talk with everyone who camps there. They were very friendly people.

Near the Mesquite Springs campground are two other attractions in the park that we visited:

Scotty's Castle:

Scotty's Castle is reminiscent of the Hearst Castle in Sam Simeon -- a huge, ostentatious expression of excessive wealth in the middle of nowhere. While Sam Simeon was built by William Randolph Hearst using his newspaper fortune, the much-smaller Scotty's Castle was built by Chicagoan Albert Johnson using his insurance fortune. It's called 'Scotty's Castle' because of a friend of Johnson's, Death Valley Scotty, who claimed it as his own.

The castle was never completed. Not because the money ran out, or Johnson died, or anything like that... it turns out that when Johnson bought the land on which it was built, the survey was faulty. When Death Valley was being surveyed as part of its imminent National Monument status in the early 1930, they found that Johnson's actual land holding was about a mile away.

We didn't go in to the castle tour, but we did see Scotty's grave overlooking the castle. We also watched a coyote cross the picnic area in front of the castle looking for picnic scraps.

Ubehebe Crater:

At the edge of Ubehebe Crater there is a convenient sign that reads, in part:

Ubehebe ( " U - Be - He -Be " ) Crater

as a helpful pronunciation guide. So, now that you know how to pronounce U-Be-He-Be, what the heck is it, anyway?

Ubehebe Crater is a large hole caused by a volcanic eruption some thousands of years ago. The hole is about 770 feet deep and almost half-a-mile across. There are also a number of other smaller craters nearby, including "Little Hebe Crater" (pronounced "He-Be", I'm sure). We did some hiking on the loose cinders around the craters and along some knife-edge ridges between them. It was a wild moonscape, with a really strong wind threatening to throw us over the edge.

For those who are interested, there is a really good overview of the curiously varied geology of Death Valley, produced by the National Park Service.