World Exploration: Death Valley

Day 3

Mosaic Canyon is nestled just behind Stovepipe Wells. We got up early and hiked until lunch time. The canyon was an easy hike and beautiful, but not terribly exciting. We saw a bunch of little birds zipping around the canyon and making a ruckus. There were warning signs for scorpions, but alas we saw no arachnids.

From the mouth of Mosaic Canyon you can see Stovepipe Wells, far below. The rock wall of the canyon looked fantastic in the sunlight. It's a canyon!

Afterwards, we returned to the village to get a chili cheeseburger. Yum! The food at the one restaurant in Stovepipe Wells was quite good, and it wasn't even that expensive. Something like 8 bucks for a burger, but that means some poor trucker trucked a frozen stack of cow up to a 7,000 foot elevation, then down to sea level, just so I could have a burger! Not bad...and the fries were great!

I'm ready to eat!

The last half of the day was spent in the southern part of the valley. We saw Badwater Basin, the lowest point in the western hemisphere at 282 feet below sea level. It's an eerie salt flat that stretches for miles and miles.

Nearby is the Devil's Golf Course, which is composed of salt but is far from flat. Little hillocks of salt dot the ground as far as the eye can see. Salt crystals form jagged, sharp edges to snag the unwary hiker.

There's a small pond at Bad Water where endangered snails live. The water is over 300% the salinity of the ocean, bad water! The salt flats stretch on forever, and it felt weird walking across salt that crunched with each step. The jaggy pillars of salt eventually blended into the salt flat.

We found another canyon to hike that wasn't as pretty as Mosaic Canyon, but it did have a natural bridge carved by infrequent flash floods.

Finally, we took in the sunset at the Artist's Palette: a vantage point overlooking bands of blue, green, and pink stone set into the mountainside. A local raven toyed with us, and seemed to want to steal away our camera.

Richard spies a raven... Cold, calculating, terrifying. The mountains looked like icecream, warming in the sunset. Lauren posing at the moment of sunset. The final sunset on our final day in Death Valley.

Once the sun set, we returned to our hotel, but not before stopping to see the stars by the sand dunes.

Death Valley is immense, and I'm proud that Lauren and I were fit enough to test our strength against its barren desert landscapes. The valley was beautiful, Lauren was gorgeous, and she said yes : )