Skip to main content

Baking in Death Valley

Friday, May 27th – Death Valley National Park to Joshua Tree National Park, California – Day 106 

Our alarm was set for 7:30am this morning to get a good start on the day. We ate some Sesame Street cereal and then quickly packed up. Our campsite near Death Valley had hit 29 degrees Celsius by 9am. The Furnace Creek visitor center was a 30-minute drive away. On the way we passed Zabriskie Point and we stopped to walk up a gradual rise to look at the scenery. The temperature was now 34 degrees Celsius before 10am. The mountains and rock formations were beautiful. The kids’ energy was already being depressed by the heat but they were still keen. 


On our drive we saw 20 mule canyon, made famous on the box of Borax you may purchase from your local grocery store. This was the place in the early 1900’s where they mined borax, put it on a 20-mule team to bring to a local processing mill and put it on a train out of Death Valley. Gen is a big Borax fan, so we stopped to take some pictures. If it wasn’t for the trailer and a sign warning against unexploded ordinance, we would have taken a closer look. 

 The visitor’s centre was a fantastic temperature inside, beautifully air conditioned. The kids started to work on the junior ranger booklets while we filled water bottles, got passport stamps, bought a t-shirt and plugged in my laptop to charge. The displays were informative. Death Valley has the highest recorded temperature, at 57 degrees Celsius, the lowest terrestrial point at 282 feet below sea level and is the driest place in the United States. The visitor center was 190 feet below sea level and when we exited the temperature was 42 degrees Celsius. 


We ate lunch outside on a shaded bench and finished the junior ranger booklets so the nicest volunteer could go through them to ensure the kids have filled their junior ranger obligations. He asked questions of their work, suggested a youtube video to watch a sidewinder snake move, gave John a stuffed coyote to occupy him and had them pronounce the names of animals and places in the park. He was fantastic. The kids were sworn in; even promising to respect ancient history when it comes to their parents’ musical choices. 


 We parked the trailed under a shaded canopy and succeeded in bumping into the steel girder framework not once but twice before the end of the day. I’m not sure how we managed such a colossal screw up, but we did. I will take the blame. This trailer is getting more and more beat up the longer we use it. We are debating whether to sell it or keep it and it keeps getting banged up. 

 Our first step was the Artists Palette scenic drive. The kids listed off a dozen colours that they saw as we drove along the edge of a mountain range. The road was fun to drive and required our car to dodge, dip and curve around a path carved into the rock. 


Next stop, the Devil’s Golf Course. The landscape was surreal in that the ground looked like it had been ripped up. Salt was present throughout the battered ground, and it was fun to take a stroll over the hardened pieces of earth. Gen and the kids were not happy with the temperature. She took some perspective photos while the kids waited to run back to the air-conditioned car. In fairness, the temperature reading on the car topped out at 51 degrees Celsius. 


To be continued....


 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Meow Wolf and O

Wednesday, May 25th –Lake Mead National Recreation Area to Las Vegas, Nevada – Day 104  We woke up in our roadside turn out and got ready for the day. Our plan was to go for a swim at Lake Mead, see the Hoover Dam and head back into Vegas. The morning was stifling hot, we were looking forward to the swim.   We drove to the visitor centre at Lake Mead Recreation Centre. We could see Lake Mead on the way. The water was well below the high-water line on the rocks. At the visitor centre we got our passport stamped, filled our water bottles, and received junior ranger booklets. The air conditioning was so nice we set up the kids to work on their booklets and hung around. The kids finished up enough activities that they were sworn in by a very nice ranger before we left.   We decided to go see the Hoover Dam first. We dropped the trailer in the parking lot. We heard it might need to be opened at the security checkpoint and we couldn’t be bothered. The H...
Post a Comment
Read more

Canyonlands is Another Planet - Pt 1

Thursday, May 12th – Moab, Utah – Day 91  Utah is another planet. I cannot do justice to the sights that I have seen in Canyonlands National Park. They are beyond compare. I would encourage everyone to visit. The pictures we have taken do not convey the beauty of the scenery we witnessed.   We woke up in the morning after a late night. The kids did some schoolwork. We ate our oatmeal. We tried to clean up the dust that was all over the trailer. The wind had subsided in the night and the morning was pleasant and warm. Aisling had made us promise that we would climb the rock that they had all been climbing on. We strapped on our hiking boots and started towards the rock. A quick climb later we were at the top; on the way down, we were looking for pretty rocks.  The road to Canyonlands sits between two buttes with their cliffs rising on either side. The drive was thirty minutes to the entrance. The visitor centre had displays that detailed what each layer of the canyo...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Desert Forest - Part 4

We finally decided to move to our last destination before the sun set. The Arch Rock Nature trail was next. We reached the parking lot and saw the rocks in the distance, we were debating what we wanted to do. We just started moving and once we did, we found ourselves racing down the trail to the rocks. The kids wanted to play monster and once they started running, everyone else was running as well. We had another poo-mergency with no restroom in sight, the evidence is buried in the desert. There was more climbing on the rocks. We took pictures of the sun setting and took a quick look at the Arch rock before starting back to the car.  Gen was behind the wheel, an hour later we were leaving the park’s south entrance. We stopped at the Ranger station to freshen up in the bathroom and fill our water bottles before heading to our campsite. Luckily, the site was the overflow campsite for the park so was minutes from the outside of the park....
Post a Comment
Read more