After several camping trips to Death Valley in the late 1980s leading groups of seventh-grade students on their outdoor week, this wonderland’s spectacular landscape struck hard again when revisiting this spring (May 4-6).
Thirty years ago, when we occupied crude and desolate sites at Mesquite Spring Campground — a few wooden tables, firepits, “vault” bathrooms (no flush), endless desert — some flabbergasted Montecito students claimed that this part of Death Valley was a horrible “wasteland.”
“Why have you dragged us out here?” a few plaintive kids cried.
Death Valley’s dry and lurid landscape certainly is no wretched “wasteland,” but then we have to agree with historian Simon Schama’s sociological insight that “landscapes are culture before they are nature — constructs of the imagination projected onto wood, water and rock” (Landscape and Memory, page 61).
Like these students, we “see” in Death Valley whatever it is we’re searching for; our social and personal “framing” heavily affects what we think we’re observing.
Despite the early May date, Death Valley’s scorching heat boiled my spouse and me when we rolled into Furnace Creek on a Friday. Our car’s dashboard displayed 104 degrees, and we had the air conditioning running.
Our mission, naturally, was to enjoy the crazy place and the bizarre ambience from so many extremes pushed together, but we also sought to check out car-camping sites such as Wildrose and Texas Springs from our Furnace Creek hotel base.
We’ll make a second trip to Death Valley this November — the best time — and car camp at one of the four “free” sites, away from RVs and generators and even the rudimentary “civilization” found at Furnace Creek or Stovepipe Wells.
The drive to Death Valley is about 360 miles from Santa Barbara. Taking the clear “Death Valley 101 miles” sign from Olancha on Highway 395 for the last stretch, we entered the 3 million-acre national park (see 4-1-1 below for driving directions, some campsites, fees and books).
Death Valley had been considered a horrendous wasteland, to be avoided if at all possible on the trek to California, until some mid-19th-century European-Americans realized the significant mineral possibilities there, particularly borax and also some silver, among other natural resources. (The outdoor Harmony Borax Works museum is fun to stroll through, and intersting for kids.)
This arid wasteland that the Gold Rushers of 1849 learned to avoid encompasses the lowest areas in North America — almost 300 feet below sea level near Furnace Creek — and generally gets less than 2 inches of rain per year (dry Santa Barbara gets 18 inches a year).
Today, Americans and especially foreigners view Death Valley as one of the Earth’s grand natural wonders, ranking up there with Yellowstone and Yosemite.
The jagged mountain rim surrounding the saline basin we call Death Valley extends in a fascinating circumambulation, and it contributes to a demanding topography hiding outlandish life-forms. On these ovenlike rocky slopes, temperatures climb to intense levels, and my partner and I enjoyed a 108-degree inferno on our second day.
Even the indigenous Native Americans, the Timbisha Shoshone, lived mostly on the higher elevations near more abundant water resources, and only descended into this salty crucible in the cooler times of the year. There, at the waters of the flowing Furnace Creek spring, for example, they would harvest mesquite beans, munch on the abundant chuckwalla lizards and fairly soon retreat back up to the mountain slopes.
Despite our binoculars, we weren’t able to observe any of the famous bighorn sheep, or the zebra-tailed lizard, kit foxes or desert hairy scorpions, yet there were plenty of creosote bushes, mesquite and darting roadrunners. In the old days, my schoolboys and girls gleefully focused on the lizards, serpents and scary scorpions in their dusty struggle to survive in the conflagration.
The Timbisha Shoshone tribe carves special, long sticks, which you can see at the very helpful Visitor Center in Furnace Creek, with thorn hooks at the end designed to fish out the prevalent and nutritious big lizards, the famed chuckwallas.
The Death Valley species is the common chuckwalla (Sauromalus ater; no longer called S. obesus!) and grows to between 12 and 18 inches at maturity. To survive, it hides among hot rocks and inflates itself so the predator cannot extract it. The Shoshone prick the ballooning folds of lizard skin with their perfect long tool, the reptile is no longer obesus and they drag it out for roasting.
We all suffer from the pernicious light pollution marking the early 21st century in North America, causing aching orbs in the Anthropocene. Stargazers, therefore, flock to the astonishing night sky in Death Valley. Even with a pair of weak binoculars, I could make out common constellations, and moonless nights render a marvelous optical effect.
Death Valley has earned the designation as an International Dark Sky Park, and when you visit you will understand how illuminating it can be at midnight and witness the Milky Way in all its starry glory.
We drove over to the rough desert car-camping site at Texas Springs ($16 a night), but the 90 sites already were shuttered becasue of the heat. In the 1980s, I had car-camped at Wildrose and Thorndike camps to the south, so we avoided checking them out (see 4-1-1). We want to car camp in order to feel more authentically “Death Valley” than staying at the well-appointed Ranch at Death Valley in Furnace Creek, where we stayed two nights this time.
In the end, Zabriskie Point and the “Artists Palette” areas fascinated us, and everyone idolizes the multicolored Manly Beacon at Zabriskie Point. From Zabriskie, it’s an easy 3½-mile trek down Golden Canyon via Gower Gulch to the Golden Canyon trailhead, a pleasant walk I’ve made several times with seventh-grade students.
The parking lot at the air-conditioned Furnace Creek Visitor Center contained vehicles from more than 14 states, and many rental cars indicated foreigners. In the visitor center, we heard German, French, Iberian Spanish and other tongues we could not decipher. What a cool — er, hot — melting pot!
Long ago, European-Americans came here to extract natural resources such as silver and borax, but by the mid-1920s, development had begun, and the tourist flood began as a trickle. In 1933, the area received federal protection, and in 1994, then-President Bill Clinton added another 1.7 millions acres and enhanced the protections against further rapacious development.
Historian Schama is correct in his insight that we draw from the landscape what we want to see. For the Shoshone, it was an occasional oasis to catch chubby chuckwallas; for the ’49ers and later developers, the mineral wealth called them and we get the Harmony Borax Works and the Keane Wonder Mine.
But by the 1950s, most Americans saw Death Valley as an ascetic and weird wonderland — fun to visit, awful after a few days!
Grab your older kids and family and go to Death Valley! If the hotels are too rich for your blood or overcivilized, then you should visit between November and early May when car camping is bearable. (See 4-1-1 for Death Valley camping sites.)
4-1-1
» Driving route No. 1 to Death Valley: Take Highway 101 south to Highway 126 west to Interstate 5 south to Highway 14 to Highway 395 to Highway 190 (Olancha turnoff). Driving route No. 2 is shorter and runs along Highway 178 via Ridgecrest and Trona to Wildrose and Emigrant Pass. Near picturesque Wildrose Camp and its 23 sites there are two other free car camping and tent camping near the historic Charcoal Kilns: Thorndike and 8,000-foot Mahogany Flat. From here you continue on to Emigrant Camp with its 10 tent-camping sites, and where you rejoin Highway 190 and find Stovepipe Wells Village just 8 miles along. All of these are no reservation, first-come, first-served. The fee for entering Death Valley National Park is $30 including your vehicle; if you are older than 65 and have the Senior Pass (the National Parks & Federal Recreational Lands Pass), then it’s just $10.
» Simon Schama’s magisterial Landscape and Memory (1995) is available in paperback at Chaucer’s Bookstore.
— Dan McCaslin is the author of Stone Anchors in Antiquity, and has written extensively about the local backcountry. He serves as an archaeological site steward for the U.S. Forest Service in the Los Padres National Forest. He welcomes reader ideas for future Noozhawk columns, and can be reached at cazmania3@gmail.com. Click here to read additional columns. The opinions expressed are his own.
