Even though we were considerably south of Badwater, we wanted to camp further north to give us a jump on going home the next day. On the way, we stopped at a low spot on the playa that still held some water leftover from the rain, then it on was to Zabriskie Point to play tourist. Zabriskie Point is probably the number one view spot in the Park because it is so close to downtown Death Valley: two hotels, a golf course, a restaurant, and the Park Headquarters. The Inn at Furnace Creek, where Michele and I got married in 1993, is only three miles from Zabriskie and, the sunrise after our wedding, we posed for photographs there so it was fun to see a German couple doing the same thing (although they seemed younger and hipper than I can ever remember being).

Then we drove a couple of miles up the road behind Zebinsky and followed a gravel road up a drainage to the Hole In The Wall where we camped. three miles up a fan behind the hole.

As I’m writing this, the only three people who seem to have a chance to be president are all old, white, and male, coronavirus infections have passed 100,000, and South by Southwest has been Canceled, so writing about Death Valley seems a little strange, frivolous.

The good news is that everybody seems to agree that Bernie Sanders is now classified as a white man; that would not have been the case fifty years ago. But, white man or not, he is still old and almost undoubtedly not going to win. The people in power, the people with money, do not want change that costs them anything and Bernie represents that change, the speed at which they circled the wagons around Biden, at his first sign of life, was truly stunning. David Brooks thinks that this is a good thing and he presents a pretty good case. His core point is that The politics of the last four years have taught us that tens of millions of Americans feel that their institutions have completely failed them. The legitimacy of the whole system is still hanging by a thread. The core truth of a Biden administration would be bring change or reap the whirlwind. I’m not a Biden fan, I didn’t like him when he first ran for president in 1988, but maybe he has been around long enough to fight the system. Maybe.

The consensus, at least among the so-called mainstream media, is that Trump aggravated the problem by taking the coronavirus as a personal affront and he stonewalled it when he first found out about it in January. All he did was pretend that the coronavirus was a hoax. Maybe pretend is the wrong word, he’s old and maybe he just can’t comprehend the reality of what he’s facing. I know that I’m having trouble fathoming it. I read that China has at least 3,015 deaths but I keep reading that the epidemic is slowing down in China and, out of 1,404,000,000 people, 3,015 doesn’t seem so bad. I keep reading that the flue has killed more people this year so how afraid should I be?

South by Southwest has been shut down and the Ferrari team may not be able to leave Italy to go to Australia for the first Formula One race of the year; is that overkill? I don’t know but I do know that Michele and I were going to go to a movie tonight and we decided not to. Last Tuesday, we went out to dinner at Fey, one of our excellent local Chinese restaurants and it was almost empty. Now we are thinking, Why take the risk? No matter how small. Tonight we’re going to stay home and watch Hustlers. Speaking of which, we saw Contagion the other night, and I would heartily recommend it.

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.