3. Death Valley and a bit beyond

So we leave the sand dunes in the bottom of the valley and skip for about 30 miles across the border into Nevada to the nearest town, Beatty.  It’s now dark and as we drive past the RV park on the edge of town I say quite reasonably “what’s the name of our hotel ?”  The answer is “Oh I forgot to write it down but I’ll know it if I see it”.  It turns out to be the Death Valley Inn.  The town is eminently forgettable, on a crossroads and to give you an idea, the town brochure lists 8 reasons to visit.  The first five are a drive away, another is that it’s cooler than Death Valley, one is “reasonable room rates” and the last is about seeing a shoot-out in downtown Beatty.   We need access to the Valley so we stay 3 days in a very comfortable hotel with breakfast available across the road at a real old fashioned diner with real friendly waitresses.  The second breakfast we had, there was a different waitress on and “SIT ANYWHERE” was our greeting.  Then “CAWFEE !”  It wasn’t so welcoming but the breakfast was fine.  The town has four eating places, the best by far being Denny’s which is a sort of third division Wetherspoons without the alcohol.  Denny’s is approached through a casino, a smoky, soulless and joyless place with a few customers huddled in front of one-armed bandits which don’t even have the exercise level of an arm to pull.  What a depressing place- and then, Denny’s.

Long before first sparrow chirp, we’re up on our first day by 5.15 so that we can get into the valley to see sunup and spend a whole day there.   We’re headed for Zabriskie Point which shares its name with a film whose content I am unfamiliar with.   Arriving with about five minutes to spare we find fifty cars or so and an impromptu coffee stall set up.  Interestingly in the pre-dawn stillness and even just afterwards, everybody speaks in whispers, something which has not happened since we arrived two weeks ago.  The area is all bare rock of varying colours which naturally change colour dramatically as the light increases.  Half an hour after sunup everyone has gone and the temperature starts to rise.  There are signs warning about extreme heat danger stating that hiking is not safe after 10.00 am. so we expect it to be warm.  It is still early so we head into the bottom of the valley and walk about 2.5 miles along a bare and narrow canyon with very few plants in a vast area of rock and sand.  Many people take no notice of the warnings and at 10-ish as we finish, people are setting off in sandals, shorts and sleeveless tops to do the same walk.  As we get into our car, a cyclist rides past and we go for breakfast in the Furnace Creek Inn, the first restaurant we’ve ever been in that’s below sea level.

Death Valley itself is about 20 miles across and about 80 miles long although the National Park is much bigger at 3.4 million acres.  This is the sort of stuff to pick up at the really good, air-conditioned visitor centre.  Apparently this isn’t a valley at all because a valley is carved out by water whereas this was formed by tectonic movement pulling the sides apart with the bottom gradually filling with sands and gravels from erosion of the valley sides (but I’ll still call it a valley).  As we leave the centre, the thermometer outside shows that it is 99F and the humidity is 5%.  Rainfall so far this year has been 0.88 inch.  The problem with the mix of high temperature and low humidity is that you can’t tell that you’re sweating because it evaporates immediately and not realising this is the quickest way to die from dehydration.  Two people have died this year from what they term “heat-related causes”.  Writing this I’ve had to have a beer although we’re a long way from Death Valley now.

It is a spectacularly dramatic place, austere and beautiful, worn, rugged and battered, ranging from multi coloured rocks, sand dunes, salt pans and sheer cliffs to areas that look like industrial pollution on a grand scale.  If landscapes were people this would be Sid James.  Some of these areas are industrial because the area was heavily mined and still is in places but I cannot imagine what it must have been like to do strenuous work in these conditions.  Don’t for a moment though think that this is a sterile lifeless place.  On the contrary, it’s full of life.  There are sparse plants everywhere, insects, birds and mammals (we see two foxes but later and off the valley floor).  At one point we park in the middle of ‘The Devil’s Golfcourse’ which is a salt pan made up of crystallised rock salt in lumps about the size of a small sports bag.  It stretches for perhaps a mile across and a couple long and in the middle of this we get back to the car to find that a grasshopper has landed on the roof.  Later at Badwater, the lowest point in the USA at 282 feet below sea level, there’s a small, salty pool with plants growing around the edge and half a dozen or so birds hopping about.  I can confirm that this area is warmish.

It’s often assumed that deserts do not have enough water but of course this is a misconception.  They have just the right amount of water and whole ecosystems have developed to take advantage of the conditions, whichever desert it is.  The quantity of water for that ecosystem is fine, the problem comes when we try to build a city in it.   The city can only survive on extracting groundwater which is a limited resource and the city is ultimately doomed, as I believe is the case with Phoenix, Arizona (on Route 66 – more of which later).

In the visitor centre they had an April Fool’s day piece from a newspaper from about 1913 extolling the beauty and appeal of Death Valley as a holiday resort, a joke that amusingly turned out to be a reality.  The place abounds with names that celebrate the rigour of the place, Death Valley, Badwater and Furnace Creek I’ve mentioned but also Last Chance Mountain, Dantes View, Dry BoneCanyon, Deadman Pass, Coffin Peak and Funeral Peak.  You get the idea I’m sure.   It’s a bit like those trainee Viking estate agents who named Iceland and then when they had a bit more experience and discovered a colder, more distant and far less amenable place mostly covered in ice, called it Greenland.

Three days have gone by and much as we like the place we think we’ve seen enough for the casual look we allow ourselves.  Yes, we’ve done it to death.

Southwards, heading towards the first town Baker, which lies about 150 miles from Beatty and where we hope to find somewhere for the night.  Baker turns out to be a big service station between Los Angeles and Las Vegas and spreads for a couple of miles alongside the interstate highway.  Every fast food joint you’ve ever heard of, a lot you haven’t and nothing else.  So we push on a further 65 miles to Barstow – does every town around here begin with a B ?  

Barstow has the same strip development of fast food and motels but is far superior to Baker, so we stop in a hotel right on the old Route 66 and have dinner in what’s called a Mom and Pop place.  That means family owned rather than part of a restaurant chain.

Now Route 66.  Most of you will know The Rolling Stones version, some Chuck Berry’s 1961 release and a few Nat King Cole’s of a song from the 1940’s mythologizing and romanticising the road which “winds from Chicago to LA” (that’s not Leicester Again).   What you may not know is that this is the route a huge number of “The Okies” (although not all from Oklahoma) used in a desperate attempt to escape poverty and starvation in 1930’s dustbowl hit mid-west as they headed to California.  They got their “kicks on Route 66” from many of the towns on the way, ready to exploit the unwanted.  So this is a road that saw death and great misery to people who on arrival in California were migrant labour, exploited by low wages just as migrant workers are today.  They left the mid-west with nothing and arrived with less.  Today there are museums in many places about Route 66, Motels are named after it and signs are on the asphalt itself to proclaim Route 66.  Obviously many people using the road did not suffer the hardship and did enjoy their journey but it just seems to me a bit like romanticising the route of The Jarrow Crusade of 1936.  Although for just a road and one that doesn’t even exist anyone, you’ve got to hand it to those marketing people.

As a way of not ending on a serious note, life being far too serious to be serious about it, here’s some signs we’ve seen so far that I find amusing.

Ad by the road - Cowboy Plumbing

On the roadside - Speed Enforced by Aircraft

Just before a service station – Eat fruit.  Get gas.

On a white van - Old Sod Construction Inc.

On the coast – Entering Tsunami Hazard Zone

And my favourite – Death Valley Health Centre

My all-time favourite is still one I saw in Texas many years ago –

Prison Escape Zone – Do not pick up hitch-hikers.