val·ley/ˈvalē/noun; 1.a low area of land between hills or mountains, typically with a river or stream flowing through it. Google.

I was going to start this by saying Death Valley is not a valley, it is a graben, but it turns out that, while it is a graben, it also fits the definition for a Valley. Specifically a Rift Valley. The surface of the earth is pulling apart here and the broken pieces – called blocks – of the surface are tilting as they pull apart. The high side of the block gets more weather and erodes faster with the eroded material running down to the low side of the block making it heavier which, like a sea-saw, pushes the high side even higher. The valley part of Death Valley is not from a river eroding a valley like the Nile Valley, it is the low side of the sea-saw being pushed down into the underlying magma.

At Badwater, we are standing at 279 feet below sea level but we are also standing on the surface of about 9,000 feet of fill that has washed down from the mountains, both the Black Mountains behind us and the Panamint Mountains in front with their huge fan-shaped piles of rocks washed down from above. For scale, the mountain directly in front of us, in the top picture, with a sprinkling of snow, is Telescope Peak at 11,049-feet.

JR wanted to see Badwater, which is the lowest place in North America, so we decided to drive down the Badwater Road, check out Badwater and then hike a couple of canyons south of Badwater. This is not an area I know very well; I’ve spent most of my time in the north and western parts of the park but, probably in the early 80s, several of us hiked a number of canyons in the area sort of at random because there was not much information available on wilderness hiking. Now, there are sorts of blogs with dozens of hikes reviewed in detail. We choose Sidewinder Canyon, in the Black Mountains, from a blog by Steve Hall.

This is a different experience for me, I am, by far, the slowest and weakest hiker. Forty years ago, we easily did hikes that are impossible now. Forty years ago, I would have walked to the end of Sidewinder and probably climbed out to catch the view, now I only get halfway up – and, since I didn’t get to the end, I’m not even really sure if I got that far – and the thrill of getting above the canyon and looking down on the immensity of Death Valley is only vicarious.

I did get a sense of the immensity of the Valley when we camped a mile up Queen of Sheba Road which ran up a shallow fan to an old mine (that we didn’t visit).

The next day, we try another Steve Hall hike, this one called Room Canyon but I’m pretty sure that we actually walked up the wrong fan into the wrong drainage. What I like about hiking in this area is the feeling of exploration, the sort of pseudo-adventure of not know what is ahead and being, in that regard, in the wrong canyon is the same as being in the right canyon as far as I am concerned. The journey is the destination in this case. Walking up a fan into a canyon is a pleasure that is hard to explain. We are in this immense space with a zen-like austerity and it is composed of an almost infinite amount of detail.

To be finished….