Day Forty

It was cold but clear this morning in Shoshone and promised to be a beautiful day. After taking Zoobley on her hour-long morning walk, I had bacon and eggs at the Cafe Crowbar while she slept on my coat in the truck. At this point, everything I own is covered with short white hairs including the upholstery in the truck so I have just given up and learned to live with it.

Badwater Basin

Many of the roads in Death Valley National Park were washed out during Spring flooding, so we entered a less well maintained road near Shoshone. Our first stop was the Badwater Basin, the lowest point in the western hemisphere at 282 feet below sea level. According to Park signs, only six spots on earth are lower with the Dead Sea on the border of Jordan and Israel being the lowest at 1,360 feet below seal level. Making the salt covered basin even more dramatic, Telescope Peak, less than twenty miles to the west looms above it all at 11,049 feet. In addition to encompassing one of the lowest spots on Earth, Death Valley is also one of the hottest places on the planet with a record high temperature of 134 degrees Fahrenheit recorded in July 1913 and one of the driest with an average annual rainfall of less than two inches per year.

Lowest point in western hemisphere

After Badwater Basin, Kudzu and I bypassed Park headquarters at Furnace Creek and went on to Stovepipe Wells, a Death Valley resort dating to the 1920s, leaving time for a leisurely walk along one of the many undeveloped Park roads and a couple of hours of reading in the semi-warmth of the low December sun. Stovepipe wells apparently got its name from the sections of tin stovepipe early travelers stuck in the sand to mark wells they had dug.