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xxx Visit Death Valley http://www.azcentral.com/travel/articles/20131207death-valley-baddest-lands.html Death Valley: Baddest of lands By Roger Naylor Special for The Republic Fri Dec 6, 2013 11:19 AM Arizona Republic contributor Roger Naylor has written a book, “Death Valley: Hottest Place on Earth.” Here is an excerpt. Let’s be clear: Death Valley, Calif., is a stunning, beautiful place of immense diversity with an ideal climate several months of the year. Much of autumn is deliciously mild, and spring can be balmy and occasionally heralded by waves of colorful wildflowers. Winter even includes high mountain peaks mantled in snow. Summers, however, are a different story. More than just a name, Death Valley is truth in advertising. This is the bad boy of deserts, the one your mama warned you about. Staggering extremes are the norm. Rising mountains and falling valley floors create the defining drama. The knife-blade peaks of the Panamint Mountains loom above Badwater Basin, 2 miles of whiplash-inducing vertical relief. That’s twice what occurs at Grand Canyon. Amid the expanse of Death Valley is an endless assortment of dramatic scenery. You’ll find deep canyons, haunting badlands, sand dunes, lake beds, craters and even fragile wetlands. Nearly 1,000 native plant species dot the landscape, and dozens of species of animals prowl the hills. Then summer crashes the party and it turns hot. The sun appears the size of a manhole cover in the sky and temperatures climb into triple digits. But it’s a dry heat. Good lord, is it a dry heat! So dry you can stand on the salt flats and hear the ground cracking and popping, like the Earth smacking parched lips. It is a thuggish, ferocious heat. It is a heat that wilts your bones and peels the enamel from your teeth. It is a heat that punches you in the stomach and steals your lunch money. Summers are long and hot. Although the sun might be 93 million miles away from most of the planet, stand in the middle of Death Valley and you feel you can hit it with a well thrown rock. Death Valley is the hottest place on the globe. The hottest temperature ever recorded anywhere was at Furnace Creek — 134 degrees on July 10, 1913. On July 12, 2012, the low temperature at Death Valley was 107 degrees. Don’t miss Badwater This is the salt-dipped heart of the park. Named for a shallow briny pool tucked like Satan’s spittoon at the base of the Black Mountains, it’s not actually poisonous. It’s just as salty as seawater. At 282 feet below sea level, it’s the lowest spot in North America. To snap things into perspective, glance up at rocky cliffs high above and you’ll spot a barely legible sign that reads “Sea Level.” Stay on the boardwalk around the pool to avoid crushing the tiny snails that call this place home. Then continue onto the blinding whiteness of the flats. The saltpan — it’s about 95 percent pure table salt — covers 200 square miles, a scorched crust of bright light and shimmering haze. Walk beyond the crowds to gain a sense of the sprawling dimensions and utter desolation. Salt Creek This is another little corner of Death Valley that takes you by surprise. Salt Creek forms a shrubby oasis amid otherwise desolate badlands. For much of the year, Salt Creek is nothing more than a few puddles. Yet even such a haphazard waterway manages to sustain a population of pupfish found nowhere else in the world. Salt Creek pupfish (Cyprinodon salinus) are Ice Age relics, the ecosystem crumbs left over from that era of abundance when Lake Manly covered Death Valley. As waters receded, the pupfish were stranded in isolated pools of varying sizes, temperatures and salt content. The pupfish managed to survive and eventually evolve into separate species. Death Valley supports five species of pupfish. A half-mile of wooden boardwalk loops through the pickleweed and salt grass surrounding the creek. This is easy walking, with lots of good viewpoints when water is flowing and informational signs along the way. Pupfish are small, only an inch or two, and are best seen in the spring during mating season. Zabriskie Point This is Death Valley’s quasi-official sunrise- and sunset-viewing spot. A short trail climbs to a comfortable perch where visitors savor a maze of wildly eroded badlands. Long fingers of mudstone ridges grasp at the valley floor and gather shadows in the slanted light. Perhaps more than any spot in the park, Zabriskie Point puts the many textures of the environment on display. The depths and details of the ripples, wrinkles and rills emerge in the soft light as crowds gather at dawn and dusk. The overlook offers a stunning panorama of a barren landscape. Furrowed hills, most of them yellow as the sun’s belly, spread across the desert floor. Rising above the badlands is the jutting shark tooth of a hill known as Manly Beacon. Be sure to visit at sunset. That light, so hard and brittle at noon, melts like warm honey down the slopes of these crumpled, rumpled hills as day dissolves into dusk. The Racetrack Nestled in a remote valley of the Cottonwood Mountains is a dry lake bed, or playa, known as the Racetrack. It’s oval-shaped, about 3 miles long and 2 miles wide, and freakishly flat. The north end rises less than 2 inches higher than the south. Here, rocks mysteriously slide across the surface, cutting furrows in the sediment as they move. Despite the speedy implication of the Racetrack moniker, getting there is anything but fast. The 27-mile gravel road begins at Ubehebe Crater and is as washboardy as a Depression-era laundromat. A high-clearance vehicle is strongly recommended for the teeth-rattling ride. At just under 20 miles you arrive at Teakettle Junction, a wooden sign draped with a collection of teapots, ranging from simple to ornate. They clink and clank in the breeze and reflect sunlight like a prospector’s gold tooth. Some of the pots are adorned with stickers, slogans and the occasional scrawled platitude. The Racetrack comes into view a few miles before you get there, soft beige bottomland tucked between mountains. At the north end of the playa, a jumbled thrust of quartz monzonite rises like a forgotten island. The dark outcropping is known as the Grandstand and adds a dramatic vertical note to the level surface. There’s parking at the edge of the lake bed and you can walk out to the stony cluster. Most of the moving rocks are at the south end of the playa. Park and walk out into the big empty. Here you’ll find rocks that have tumbled from the nearby mountains. Some are the size of pineapples, others as big as a motel mini fridge. The rocks move — sometimes hundreds of feet — leaving distinct trails behind them. Some stones travel in a straight line, others in an arc. Some can’t seem to make up their minds, leaving zigzag patterns etched in the playa. No one has actually witnessed this phenomenon. Some scientists theorize that periods of heavy rain turns the hard clay of the playa exceedingly slippery, then fierce winds send rocks sliding across the slick surface. Others believe the addition of ice or a thin coating of moisture-induced bacteria is needed along with the wind. Or maybe the rocks are pushed around by visiting aliens like an extraterrestrial game of shuffleboard. Whatever the cause, these joyriding boulders add a sweet touch of mystery to an astonishing place. Book signing Roger Naylor will discuss “Death Valley: Hottest Place on Earth” at 7 p.m. Monday, Dec. 9, at Changing Hands Bookstore, 6428 S. McClintock Drive, Tempe. Filled with travel information, history and photographs, the book is from Rio Nuevo Publishers and costs $12.95. Naylor also will discuss his book at 2 p.m. Monday, Dec. 16, at Tubac Presidio State Park. More about the author: www.rogernaylor.com. |