10/02/2022

Day two in Death Valley.

This one was a slower pace to yesterday, as we saw most “the hits” yesterday. I started the day nice and early and left the room a bit after 7am for a morning hike. I visited the Golden Canyon, one of the main sites/hikes that we didn’t get to yesterday. It is also a last piece of the Star Wars puzzle.

The Golden Canyon is a fairly easy 3km hike through a delightful canyon that catches the sun in all kinds of nice ways that time of morning. It is most famous for being the main hangout for Jaws from A New Hope. While I couldn’t find the EXACT rocks they hide behind, you will agree, it looks mighty familiar!

I decided to go a little further from the trail end and clamber through some tighter canyons to the Red Cathedral. It was basically the end of a trail that got you right to the reddish cliff faces, within a fairly enclosed area, giving a fairly dramatic end to the trail.

I then made my way back out of the canyon, and by 9am was back at the room. From there, we had some breakfast and piled into the car to drive about 40 miles to our next spot, the Ubehebe Crater.

This crater is volcanic, and again highlights the incredible diversity of the park. It also makes you realise how huge it is (the largest in the continental USA), when you drive for over an hour to get to one of the other ends of the park.

The crater was very cool, and an hour long hike took me around the lip of the crater. I very much enjoyed the signs advising that I haad to use caution when spinning on may back breakdancing near the edge 🙂

After the invigorating hike, it was back into the car. One of the drives we wanted to do we were advised against given the state of the off roading we would have to do, so instead we headed just outside the park to visit one of the nearby ghost towns. After a quick stop in the small town of Beatty (where I acquired some random hot tortilla snacks) we arrived at Rhyolite, one of a number of ghost towns that exist in the area.

Rhyolite only existed for a couple of decades in the early 1900s, and lives on as a few building shells and a makeshift open air gallery. The highpoint is the fairly in tact old railway station. It seems that it was only realised about 20 years ago that they should try to preserve the buildings, so most are worse for wear, but the train station was fairly well preserved (albeit a bit stripped for parts).

The open air gallery was, well, a bit odd. The spooky figures were quite cool (the main set were a ghostly representation of “The Last Supper” I think). Wasn’t sure what to make of the Minecraft looking naked lady though.

Most of the day had disappeared by this point so it was time to head back to the hotel. We made it in time to grab some drinks and enjoy our last sunset in Death Valley. Back on the road tomorrow, to Utah!

Salt Flat Hijinx

09/02/2022

A very average buffet breakfast under the belt and it was back on the road. We said goodbye to Pahrump (seemingly the fireworks capital of the US given how many fireworks stores were on the main drag), and it was back into California and off to Death Valley!

We went from an elevation of around 4000 feet at one point and made our way into the park, which bottoms out at a few hundred feet below sea level. That led to some pretty significant changes in temperature through the day! This was the perfect time to go, as the high temp was around 30 degrees. Pretty warm you probably think… but it is not the 50+ degrees it gets to in the summer months!

While the incredible landscapes of this National Park would be enough to get us excited, what gave it an added bonus was that a number of scenes from Star Wars (specifically A New Hope and Return of the Jedi) were filmed here! It takes a fair encyclopaedic knowledge of the films to recognise the exact locations… but rest assured, I could 🙂

First visit was to the Furnace Creek Rangers Centre, where we picked up our ANNUAL PASS! for the National Parks. Yep, we have a few on the hit list for this trip.

From there it was off to Zabriske Point. This was some incredible views (the common theme for the day). I did a quick additional run up a nearby peak to soak up more. My way back down was made a bit harder than it should have been… me completely misreading the trail and needing to scale down quite the vertical rock face. Whoops. All good and safe, but I won’t do that again!

Next up was a drive through Twenty Mile Team Canyon. This was a narrow drive through some gorgeous canyons, and home to the first Star Wars site… where we can spy C3PO and R2-D2 walking toward Jabba’s Palace in Return of the Jedi. I don’t know what that says about me, that the rock formations looked exactly right!

We then had a bit of a drive, to head from sea level, up to Dante’s View. This peak is over 5000 feet above Death Valley and along with being presently cool, is also where Ben Kenobi and Luke get their first view of Mos Eisley (referred to as a “wretched hive of scum and villainy”) in A New Hope. Again, it totally gave me the Star Wars vibes.

Death Valley National Park is a pretty huge park and we drove many miles back and forth. We then drove about 30 miles to get to the lowest point in North America, the Badwater Basin Salt Flats. We love some salt flats, and they were great to run around on.

We then headed to the Artist’s Palette drive, which was another canyon-like drive to see some “painted” rocks… where the painting is a natural oxidisation of parts of the landscape. Most importantly, it is also where there is a shot of R2-D2 wandering through a Tatooine canyon 😉

The park has thousands of miles of trails, but we elected to just do some very short ones here and there. One was to the mouth of Desolation Canyon. This would have taken a few hours to do the whole thing, but I made sure to visit the point where Tuskin Raiders and their Banthas start to cause trouble in A New Hope.

The day was starting to slip away with the fairly early sunsets, so we drove the 20 or so miles to the Mesquite Sand Dune. Yep, in Death Valley you get salt flats, sand dunes, and there are even waterfalls hiding in there too. The sand dunes are heaps of fun to run around, but they are also home to a shot in A New Hope of a very lost R2-D2. It was hard to get that exact pic given the changing sands, but I could pick it from the distant mountain shapes. We stayed for sunset here, with the dunes and distant mountains giving us gorgeous shadows and colours.

The sun had dropped, so we went to our digs for the night. We decided to splurge for these two nights and stay in the centre of the park at The Inn at Death Valley, a beautiful hotel from the 30s oozing charm. It was a nice way to wind down… a beer, star gazing, and relaxing for another energetic day in the National Park tomorrow.