Motorhome in Motion: Death Valley

We've long since left Death Valley and find ourselves now in Loreto, Baja Sur, Mexico - a desert by the sea - but as we look at the many mountain ranges and valleys down here, we can't help thinking about our time at Death Valley National Park earlier in December. So much of the southwest has a haunting beauty to it, with interesting rock formations and a barren-looking landscape. But there was something different about Death Valley. It is hard to articulate. Maybe it's just because the park wasn't what I expected, but, then again, what did I expect? The first word that often comes to mind is DESOLATE. And, yes, it is, in a way, but so much more. I couldn't put what I felt about this place into words, so I asked Lew to give me three words he would use to describe his experience of Death Valley. I had my own three. They were entirely different. A friend added some more. These are the words we came up with - complex, varied, dry, raw, changing, powerful, textured, and tapestry.

Death Valley National Park - the largest in the country - is so complex and varied it almost boggles the mind. Here we find towering snow-covered peaks rising over 12,000 feet from the floor of the valley, which boasts the lowest point in the western hemisphere at 282 feet below sea level. The park has salt flats that are as much as 5 feet thick, the result of repeated flooding and evaporation over many thousands of years. There are tenacious plants and animals that have adapted to the hottest temperatures ever recorded, as well as mud and sand dunes turned to stone, ancient lava flows, active sand dunes, eerie eroded badlands, abandoned mines, wildflower displays in the spring, a volcano crater half a mile wide and 800 to 7,000 years old and still potentially active, and rocks of many varied shapes, sizes, colors, and type. Complex and varied, indeed. And dry. The mountains to the west wring out all the moisture from the ocean and there's little left for the desert. Yet it is the dryness that makes the rocks so interesting. Rock layers in Death Valley comprise nearly a complete record of the earth’s past, not in neat layers like at the Grand Canyon, but jumbled out of sequence, testifying to the powerful geologic forces that recently (in geologic time) tore the land apart.

I used the word raw because Death Valley’s geologic formations are unadorned. So little vegetation grows here, you can practically see the mountains eroding; the moraines, which on other mountains are often hidden by vegetation, are stark, visible, clearly delineated, and obvious - raw, as it were. Yes, the land is raw, but it is ever changing. The sand dunes shift in the wind, rocks fall, summer storms create flash floods that break away rocks, dig canyons, create arches, and erode away ever more mountain. It seems to happen before our eyes.

You can almost feel the powerful forces at work here, forces that pulled apart a continent, lifted up 3 mountain ranges, and sank the valleys to a depth below the sea. A visit here is truly a sensual experience, a tapestry of color – from yellow and beige and brown and black, to reds, greens, blues, and purples: a tapestry of texture – fine sands, salts, rock, mud, and water: a tapestry of shapes – intricate patterns in the salt flats to jagged mountains, rounded dunes, balanced rocks and huge boulders to tiny pebbles. Death Valley was truly an amazing, visceral experience – topped off our last night with an incredible display of stars containing the arc of the milky way, a sight we hadn’t seen in years. It was a good reminder that we are not as important as we think we are. This is a vast universe and we are fortunate to live on such an incredible planet.We shall return.