Each day offers something completely different in this amazing park.

This is our home for two nights- Furnace Creek Campground... the perfect spot for being in the middle of it all.
Zabriskie Point, for a brief explore, was our first stop today.


We then drove through another interesting canyon, one of diverse views and some scary turns. We loved it all.


Our afternoon was spent at Dante's View, a spectacular area almost 6,000 feet about the valley floor (and 25° colder). We were here for The View to Another World as part of the Dark Sky Festival.
Visiting this site was a first for us as it's pretty much a 26 mile detour. But sometimes detours are so worth it and this certainly was... breathtaking.



Our host was Bruce Banerdt, Principal Investigator for the InSight Mission to Mars (Jet Propulsion Laboratory).  Looking out over Death Valley, this talk surveyed landscapes of extreme environments, along with Bruce's first-hand account of work going on today in the harsh environment of Mars. So dang cool.

A first for us was to explore the Inn at Furnace Creek. We began at the ruins of the Inn's historic old laundry building.



The Inn opened in 1927. Its motto,  “Would You Enjoy a Trip to Hell?...You Might Enjoy a Trip to Death Valley, Now! It has all the advantages of hell without the inconveniences.” It truly is an Oasis.

We ended our day at the Dark Sky Festival Evening Program called Exploring the Habitability of Ancient Mars with the Curiosity Rover.
Presented by Paul Mahaffy, Director of the Solar System Exploration Division at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, we spent the evening learn more than I possibly could about this amazing project. It was a very cool way to end day #2.