This year marks the centennial anniversary of the National Park Service in the States. I’ll hopefully be making my way to Yellowstone, but for now, I thought I’d share my adventure in Death Valley National Park. It’s spectacular, and if you’re in Las Vegas, I recommend you drive over for the day – the drive from Las Vegas is about 2hr 30min.
We entered the park from the East, driving through the ghost town of Rhyolite, Nevada, once a gold-rush boom town. Many relics of buildings remain, and it is eerie to wander through and imagine what it would have been like between 1904-1907, at the height of the town’s prosperity. This is not a place where tourists flock to in August, so it really does feel like ghost town.
Death Valley is the lowest point in the States, some 85m below sea level (the Dead Sea has the lowest elevation, at 414m below sea level.) The park is a desert, a hot desert, deserted in August which is the time of year I went. And no wonder – the temperature on a lovely August day was 119F/48C, 0% of precipitation, 100% chance of sweating, although you wouldn’t know it – it is so hot that sweat simply evaporates rather than hanging out on your forehead. And the wind! Imagine you have a fan oven, heated to 300C. Your casserole is baking nicely, but you want to poke it with a fork just to make sure. You stoop over the oven and pull the over door open. A rush of hot air hits your face and you jolt your head back. Fire wind, I call this. And fire wind is what you get in Death Valley and you can’t always close the oven door – the benefit is that it also helps to keep you dry.
But it’s worth going, even on a hot, fire-windy day. You don’t have to get out of the car to enjoy the views and feel really small in such a large expanse of space, a flat basin with mountains either side of you. But you should get out of the car. We got out plenty, walked among the salt deposits in the Devil’s Golf Course (I dare you to lick…just to make sure it really is salt!), meandered to Dantes View (where the wind was cool and refreshing), had lunch at the Inn and tried the local Death Valley Brewing beer, trudged along the sand dunes and went on a few short trails. It was so hot that the shutter release on my camera died on me – the photos from the park are taken on a disposable Kodak film camera.
We camped…and were the only tent on the campsite – the luxury of choosing where to pitch in a National Park is rare. It is, however, humid, hot, stuffy, and difficult to sleep even after having pitched and slept in hot and humid places like Mississippi and Louisiana where during the summer water droplets are always hanging out in the air making it difficult to breathe and stay dry. If you’re up for it, don’t bother with a sleeping bag, but do ensure that you are lying on a towel that will absorb all the moisture your body produces. And hydrate.