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….

On a beautiful spring afternoon, Michele and I went down to our local voting station. The fruit trees are in bloom and the birds are in full song. At the voting booth, we wait in line as children run in and out of the voting station. It is an idyllic scene, like something painted by Norman Rockwell for a propaganda poster but I’m not joyful, I have a sense of impending doom. In the background, a series of tornadoes killed 25 people in Tennessee and the number of people infected by the coronavirus – CIVID-19, if you want its stage name – has passed 90,000.

East away from the Sierras, south from the Panamint and Amargosa, east and south many an uncounted mile, is the Country of Lost Borders. Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain

February is a great time to go to the desert. It is usually cold, wet, and dreary, in the Bay Area and the desert promises the warmth of clear skies. This year is different, for the first time since 1860, February will not bring any rain to the Bay Area and while we were getting ready to go to Death Valley, the forecasters kept forecasting rain. I have been rained on in the California desert, maybe, five times and only once was the rain hard enough to get us wet and that was a cloud burst that lasted about thirty seconds, so the forecast did not seem very threatening.

I was aghast when I realized that I haven’t been to Death Valley in seven years. Seven years! In my mind’s eye, I go to Death Valley twice a year and, I did, from the late seventies to the early eights, but I tapered off to once a year in the nineties, and then, apparently, I kept tapering. And now once every seven years? However, going over Tehachapi Pass, at the southern end of the Sierras, as we climb out of the San Juaquin Valley – as the southern part of the Great Central Valley is called – and enter the Mojave Desert, nothing much seems different. Oh, sure, there are more windmills and bigger windmills but nothing else seems to have changed.

Once in the Mojave, we see a new lake only to realize it is a giant solar farm. One of the things that I like about the drive from the Bay Area to Death Valley is the subtle change from very urban to very wild. The Mojave nearest Tehachapi is strangely high-tech with Edwards Air Base – which bills itself as The Center of the Aerospace Testing Universe – the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake which tests naval air weapons systems, and The Mojave Air and Space Port in the town of Mojave where several billionaires are racing each other into space. Next comes the RV Mojave where more RVs are flying American Flags and now, some Trump flags, somehow, flying a Trump flag on an RV in a public campground in the desert seems like an angry act of defiance. It makes me wonder how long those feelings of injustice – both real and imagined – have been festering. Then Trona, an old-time mining town gone high-tech. North of Trona is the Slate Range Crossing with a super overlook into the Panamint Valley. We expected to catch the sunset there and then go on to meet Courtney, Gina, and JR at Panamint Springs for dinner, but the sky was getting increasingly overcast and the light flat.

Over dinner at Panamint Springs, Courtney said that the precise forecast was rain about five in the morning continuing until about eleven. We went to bed, under cloudy skies but there was no rain of any real substance until about seven the next morning. Then it started to rain for real. Then it kept raining and raining, off and on, all day. I’ve been seriously rained on in the desert in Nevada and Utah, even in the Atlas Mountains, but those were cloud bursts and this was different. Even though this seemed to be frontal rain, it was not a drizzle or steady rain, but big drops of rain that seemed to be falling through an otherwise very dry sky. Plop, a drop would hit my jacket with a noticeable sound, then another one, then another, even as the first drop dried so that my jacket and the ground was always almost dry.

Whatever reasons Americans may pretend for taking a gun out into the desert, most of them are going to fire at road signs, water tanks, memorial plaques, wind pumps or old beer cans.… Even if it is no more than a symptom of mindless vandalism, this mania for shooting at human artifacts is not quite senseless; the identifiable humanness of their origins gives these objects a different status from everything else in view. The works of man inevitably attract the attention of mankind. Reyner Banham in Scenes in America Deserta.

The next morning, we woke – well, some woke, some slept in late – to a clear sky without a cloud in sight.

To be continued…

We liked to go to Death Valley for President’s Day because it provided a couple of days of bright sun in the dreariest part of the winter. This year however the trees are blooming and we are on track for the dryest, sunniest, February since 1860.

I meant to send this out before we left. So even though we are back, here it is as a sort of placeholder.

I only know – defining know as having shared a meal – one person who owns a hotrod and he thought that my pictures of the Grand National Roadster Show presented a skewed picture. I told him that I would post some pictures of more normal hotrods.

I thought the ’34 car above was terrific but the custom Cadilac behind it was drawing the biggest groud.

I thought that the deuce above was particularly handsome and the paint job on the roadster below completely changed its look.

A restored drag racing truck, originally from Stockton, that raced in the mid60s.

I was impressed with this custom Thunderbird, not so much that I liked it, although I did, but at how hard it must have been to chop the top with that windshield.

Both Michele and I liked this custom 1954 Kaiser by renowned – I only say that because I read it on Kustomrama, a sort of database for all things hotrod – customizer Larry Grobe from Elk Grove, Illinois who built it as a homage to George Barris (the great California customizer from the 60s who I do know of).

Rick Dore’s “After Shock,” a 1937 Ford which would fit in perfectly with Art Deco French cars of the era. 

A lovely lead sled.

Some tools of the trade.

And, lastly, a passel of restored race cars.