For being a desert, there actually isn’t that much sand in Death Valley. There’s only a couple places where the winds are right to collect enough sand to make sizable dunes, and that’s where we eventually wound up.
The Dunes
Of course, there’s always a downside to there being a bunch of sand in one spot. I got some grains into my camera and it broke, so this is the last shot you’re going to get. I wish I had been able to keep taking picture, but such is life. In any event, one of the neat things about a mound of sand is that if you knock out a small chunk of it, the sand above will flow down to fill in the space, forming a neat little shelf that moves up the dune until it gets to the top.
Falling Sands
Tags: death valley, sand
Tied in to the lore of the valley are the various mining towns that boomed and busted within just a few years. The largest one we visited was called Rhyolite. Their general store currently leaves something to be desired.
Mercantile Decay
I believe that this one was the old jail, viewed between the columns of some ancient building that I simply can’t recall. I’m pretty sure that the columns were the only part of it still standing, at any rate.
An Escape Proof Prison
This was some sort of hotel, I believe.
Four Star Accomodations
Of course the reason the city was built in the first place was for the mining. Unlike the small holes in Golden Canyon, these were fully dug shafts that would have been quite dangerous to enter. There were grates over the entrances to the most easily accessible ones, forcing me to shove the camera between the bars to get this shot.
Mining Done Right
This final shot is evidence of something a lot older than a ghost town. These are petroglyphs; etchings in the rocks made by the Timbisha Shoshone many years ago. There is no one currently alive who actually knows what they mean. The knowledge has been lost, even among the Timbisha Shoshone people still living in the valley.
Mysterious Petroglyphs
Tags: death valley, hotel, mine, petroglyph, prison, rhyolite
The next day out we took a break from the canyons and went to the floor of the valley. We wound up on a large plain of shard and spiky bits of pain. We were warned to watch our step and not to fall down, for reasons that became readily apparent.
The Great Plain
The reason we were told not to slip and fall was because the ground was made of nothing but salt. Many years ago, the entirety of Death Valley was a vast body of water called Lake Manly. Over time, the climate changed and the air in the are got dry and hot. The lake slowly evaporated, leaving behind vast deposits of evaporites, such as salt and borax. This plain was one of the larger chunks of salt that got left over.
Fragile Crystalline Growths
Of course, this wasn’t the craziest thing about the whole place. The absolute craziest thing was that the salt was actually just a giant crust on top of an underground lake. Turned out that the depositing salts had layered over top of the bottom most layer of water, which allowed the lake to remain in this section of the valley, protected by its salt shield. In the heyday of the Valley, people would use dynamite to blast into the mineral rich water below and advertise it as a healthy soak for tourists. Several of the holes have closed up since then, but this one remained for us to marvel at.
The Underground Lake
We eventually left the salt flats, and I was struck once more by just how ridiculously flat the valley could be. There was just nothing there at times.
Stay Flat, Death Valley
Tags: death valley, hannah, jackie, lake, salt