Saturday 24 May, Death Valley, NV/CA

Plan B
Today was going to be a helicopter flight over Lake Powell, over the Hoover Dam and touching down on the Grand Canyon floor within Hualapai Tribal lands, right next to the Colorado River.
We had notice of poor weather, with thunderstorms due by midday and chose to reconfirm early this am.
06:30 I rand Papillon Helicopters (with whom we had booked our flights) and were told that it didn’t look good for our 8am flight. I chose to bump our booking to 7am Monday, hence today is Death Valley Day!!

Journey
Drove south and west toward Parhump (Pr. P-Rump), then onto Death Valley Junction (which has its own Opera House (The Armagosa, run by the kooky octogenarian New Yorker, Marta Beckett). There were no performances until season start – late May :-(
From there we head for the rather ominously named …
… Death Valley.

Death Valley
Is a large desert surrounded by high mountains and contains the lowest point in the western hemisphere – Badwater, named after the minerals and salts which deposit around this region after evaporation of what little water there is around here.
From Dante’s View (5478 ft) overlook you can see almost 75% of the entire Death Valley National Park, including the almost white ‘beach-like’ flat which makes up the Badwater Basin.
In fact, much of Death Valley has been shaped (notwithstanding geological forces, still at work), by man’s mining activities, chiefly gold (go figure!), and Borax.
On the way up to Dante’s View, we drove past a former company mining town of Ryan, which has been mothballed (no doubt awaiting the day when Borax will be more economical to extract). There is no public access to Ryan, and therefore, the entire site is still in impeccable condition. The train engines are parked in old mine tunnels, and are as shiny as they day they were put out of service. The school still has its bell, rope swing, and merry go round. The company dining room still has its piano and everything is original!
After this we headed to Stovepipe Wells to buy fuel at the extortionate $4.91 – absolute piracy and I would strongly advise all potential visitors to avoid being mugged by these bandits. But at Parhump or earlier, towards Vegas.
However, before Stovepipe Wells we stopped off at Zabriskie Point – what a breathtaking view!!
This vista was surrounded by a maze of wildly eroded and vibrantly coloured (muted in today’s overcast daylight), sandstone formations.

[Pic to be inserted – interweb & portable technology permitting!]

Prior to Stovepipe Wells we attempted to photograph and walk on real sand dunes. Unfortunately these were over 1 mile away and somewhat small in stature – I want real dunes!!
It was here that we saw a French family throwing sand at a horned lizard in order to take a picture of it outside the bush in which it was basking. After a few international words, I did what readers would expect and drove to the nearest Ranger station. There ensued a brief road chase and a head-off whereby the female ranger swung her 4x4 across the road and headed off the miscreants – job done methinks!
After the fuel debacle, and my playing at ‘Junior Ranger’ for the day, we drove to the Ubehebe Crater, which I was reluctant to visit having learnt that it was not a meteoric crater but a blown cinder cone from a volcano. How glad I was that I did! The massive crater rim was over a mile and-a-half round and the wind which came from its throat was so strong you could lean over the edge and it would support you! It was almost as if the Earth itself was breathing out of this metamorphic amphitheatre.
Again, breathtaking!
After this we passed Scotty’s Castle (a folly built in the north east sector of the park)

Facts:
It is neither a castle, nor was it Scotty’s!

Scotty
Was in fact Walter Scott, known as “Death Valley Scotty”. He convinced Chicago millionaire Albert Johnson to invest in his (fraudulent) gold mine in the Death Valley area. By 1937, Johnson had acquired more than 1,500 acres in Grapevine Canyon, where the Death Valley Ranch (the ‘Castle’), is located. After Johnson and his wife made several trips to the region, he began to build what is the Spanish-style villa which became their winter home.
Folklore makes out that the difficult friendship involved the bequest of the villa by Johnson to Scotty, hence the common mis-nomer.
From here we drove back to Las Vegas via Scotty’s Junction (again, not his, but it was a junction!), Beatty and Indian Springs.

Human History
Prospectors’ Mining companies and the national government’s activity in Death Valley seriously and permanently impacted the native Timbisha Shoshone tribespeople. much of these struggles echoes throughout much of America’s history.
After becoming a national monument in 1933, the Timbisha Shoshone people viewed the national park service as an additional and newer wave of intruders. The tribe was uprooted for the last time in 1936, they were relocated to adobe homes at the current Timbisha Indian Village at Furness Creek. A less progressive administration in the 1960’s ordered that these homes be washed away by high-powered water hoses.
The Timbisha Homeland Act, passed in 2000, established a 7000 acre land base for the tribe, including their former tribal homelands, the current village and 300 acres of Death Valley National Park. The NPS aims to value the beliefs and needs of both the Timbisha Shoshone Indians and the American public! That such a distinction is enounced is another shameful example of man’s inhumanity to man.

Journey Notes and Details
Distance: 424 Miles
Duration: 10hrs, 42mins
Average May temps: Max: 99F; Min: 71F
Our temp today: 51-57F – a new record daytime low for Death Valley – joy!!
Death Valley size: 3,372, 410 acres