Death Valley Natural Wonders

 

The above picture is the main attraction of Death Valley, Badwater Basin.  It's the lowest and hottest place in the National Park at 282 feet below sea level with temperatures exceeding 130 degrees in the summer.  Fortunately those temperatures abate significantly in the winter.  We have been having daytime highs of mid-60s to low-70's for a few weeks now.  Morning lows have even dipped below 40 degrees.  We're actually running heat the first couple of hours after rising at 6:00am.  It has been a very welcomed change in weather patterns compared to our first couple of weeks after arrival where night time temps didn't get below 90 degrees.

I previously wrote about a hike to Natural Bridge and posted a good number of photos.  For this post I have a few more shots from that hike that don't have anything to do with the bridge.  Rather these are shots of "secondary" attractions or unadvertised visual delights.

First up is a canyon wall just past the Natural Bridge and just before the pour off I described in this post.  The way it looks can be best described as melted candle wax.  In reality it is just mud but it has taken form and dried in such a way to make it worth mentioning.

The two pics above have been zoomed in on to better see the detail of the melted wax effect.  This next shot is pulled back to get a better sense of just how big this structure is.

The wall with melted wax is about 40 feet tall and 60 feet wide.

The Natural Bridge hike has literature alerting hikers to the "candle wax" but I have found no mention of the next thing I spotted.  At one point, during the return to the trail head, I was struck by an image of the trail descending into a whirlpool or vortex.

As you approach this turn in the trail you can just begin to make out the swirl, but getting closer reveals a distinct spiral.  A few steps more and it disappears.

If you have been following this blog then you have seen my previous photos of our rig sitting in its camp host site in Furnace Creek.  We're kind of obvious in the daylight as we are a large RV sitting in the entrance to a tent only area of the campground.  That is until it gets dark.

Death Valley is a certified Dark Sky Park and if there is no moon it is pitch black on the ground and a dazzling sky of sparkling stars above.  Seeing the Milky Way is just a matter of looking up, it stretches from horizon to horizon.  But somebody looking to get help from the on-duty camp host would have to be intimately familiar with the campground to find us after the sun goes down.  We tried turning on our porch light but it was nothing more than a tiny pinpoint of light in the inky dark.  So on one of our trips to Pahrump Cyndee located a solar powered flood light and a clay pot for illuminating our "On Duty" sandwich board sign.  To explain; the clay pot was for holding the flood light.  The ground is dried and baked into a near-concrete.  You can't even drive a metal tent stake into it, little alone a plastic spike of a solar floodlight.  There's a hole in the bottom of clay pots.  We just picked an appropriate size, put it upside down on the ground and drop the floodlight's spike in the hole.

I guess it worked.  We started getting door knocks after dark by people that couldn't find their campsite, or wanted to know where to get firewood or to alert us to someone being a danger to others or themselves.  We're in uniform until 10:00pm rounds are completed and door knocks have typically stopped by 11:00.  There have been a couple of incidents that have run a little late.  I'll cover those shortly.