Death Valley
Trip Start
Jan 04, 2008
1
127
130
Trip End
Dec 17, 2008
Stovepipe Wells,
California,
United States
Thursday, December 4, 2008
The next morning we headed off to Death Valley. Heeding the warnings about breaking down and dying we took along a gallon of water for us and made sure that the car was full of all it's fluids. The park wasn't as bad as it sounds at all. I'm sure in the summer when the sun is at full blast that the heat is a bit ferocious but there are gas stations every 50 miles or so and plenty of places to fill up your car radiator, and if you do break down the roads have a decent amount of traffic on them that you wouldn't expect to have to walk and die of dehydration to find help. The valley itself is the largest national park in the continental US at more than 5,000 sqr miles. The main valley is a great sight at about 140 miles from north to south and about 20 miles wide. The hottest temperature recorded was 134F in 1913. As well as being the largest park the valley also has the lowest point in the continental US which is at a Badwater a spring on the edge of the salt pan at -282ft below sea level
Shield at the wheel
. Here you can walk out on a boardwalk and onto the bed of salty evaporating water Along the way we were stopped by a coyote who just stood in the road to make us stop and then spent 5 minutes or so just circling the car - a good trick to get tourists to chuck food at you !We also took a detour off the main route through an area called the Artists Palette where the layers of colourful sediment and volcanic ash have been exposed by the wind. That night we were staying in Death Valley at a hotel in a village called Stovepipe Wells. This village was just the hotel, complete with saloon bar, and a store. We've no idea where the local blokes came from who were sitting at the bar but they had a long drive home wherever that was.
The next morning we were up at 5.45am to see the sunrise as the sunset the night before hadn't been that spectacular. At that time in the morning it was freezing in the middle of the valley - but the sunrise was worth it as it appeared over the horizon making all of the mountains and dunes a vivid pink colour. We then drove up to Dante's View which stands at 5,475ft above the valley floor - so a bit of a climb for the old sebring...Up there it was even colder but we had a great view up the valley of the salt flats.
Interesting desert roads
Our next stop on the tour was the Grand Canyon so we headed out of Death Valley National Park, back onto the highway and into Nevada. Having passed through Vegas we headed to Boulder City where we planned to spend a couple of nights to take in the Canyon and the Hoover Dam. After trying a number of motels and finding them all pretty poor standard and at least $80 a night we tried to see what we could find on the internet for somewhere to stay. It turned out that due to the credit crunch that all the hotels on the Las Vegas Strip had deals on and instead of $80 a night we could stay at the Sahara in Vegas for $36 a night with 3 nights for the price of 2. This meant about an extra hours driving each day - but the hotel was much better than the motels and there would be more to do in the evenings !
