Scenes from Death Valley Pt. 2

Our second full day in the park began at Badwater Basin, an expansive salt flat, devoid of obvious life, with distant desert mountains. It is home to the lowest point in North America.


See that faint white line almost directly above our camper? That marks sea level.
Badwater Basin is 282 ft below sea level. The salt flats here cover nearly 200 square miles and are composed mostly of sodium chloride (table salt), along with calcite, gypsum, and borax.


Stories suggest that Badwater Basin earned its name when a mule belonging to an early surveyor refused to drink from the spring-fed pool near the present-day boardwalk. However, the water here is not truly “bad,” just very salty. Despite this high salinity, many organisms not only survive, but thrive here. The pool is home to an endemic snail naturally found only at this location, and its rim is dotted with salt tolerant plants, including pickleweed.

Steve and the big kids hiked then hiked to Natural Bridge, a stunning geologic formation tucked back in a Death Valley canyon.
Different from the smooth sandstone arches found in Utah, Natural Bridge is interesting because it is made of a jagged rocky alluvial deposit (rock, gravel, and sediment washed to the base of an ancient mountain and cemented together). The bridge rises approximately 35 ft above the canyon floor and is about 35 ft thick. Although rain is infrequent here, over thousands of years, flash flood events have carved the canyon which the bridge spans today.

Our last stop was at Zabriskie Point, an iconic Death Valley vista.
The spectacular views from Zabriskie Point are some of the most photographed in Death Valley National Park. Named in honor of Christian Zabriskie, a prominent figure in the heyday of the Pacific Coast Borax Company, Zabriskie Point affords an elevated vista from which to marvel at the badlands below. These yellow and brown stripped hills have been shaped by the powerful force of water, and even during dry times, the path carved by this water is unmistakable.

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Scenes from Death Valley Pt. 1

On our arrival in Death Valley, we were greeted with 99° heat accompanied by big wind gusts. It made for a very exciting first night.

Six of us (our older son and his family) piled into the truck for the 6+ hour long drive.
After a stop in the Visitors' Center for knowledge and exploring supplies, we set up camp at the Furnace Creek Campground, our home for three nights. The grands got to sleep in our camper's dinette while their parents tented it.
The sunset was spectacular, and the night sky impressed us all.

After dinner, it was time for the traditional S'mores! A perfect Day #1.
Day #2 was my 60th birthday. With the winds continuing, it proved to be the most interesting of the days, weather-wise. WOW.
Thankfully, we didn't need to fuel up here.
The plan for the day was to start by a hike to the bottom of Ubehebe Crater (formed about 2100 years ago during a single eruptive event).
The wind was so fierce the little ones could not get out of the truck for fear of being blown into the deep desert depression.


Next stop on our tour was to Rhyolite, a Nevada ghost town in the Bullfrog Hills. It began in early 1905 as one of several mining camps that sprang up after a prospecting discovery in the surrounding hills. During an ensuing gold rush, thousands of gold-seekers, developers, miners and service providers flocked to the Bullfrog Mining District. Many settled in Rhyolite, which lay in a sheltered desert basin near the region's biggest producer, the Montgomery Shoshone Mine.
Industrialist Charles M. Schwab bought the Montgomery Shoshone Mine in 1906 and invested heavily in infrastructure, including piped water, electric lines and railroad transportation, that served the town as well as the mine. By 1907, Rhyolite had electric lights, water mains, telephones, newspapers, a hospital, a school, an opera house, and a stock exchange. Published estimates of the town's peak population vary widely, but scholarly sources generally place it in a range between 3,500 and 5,000 in 1907–08.
Rhyolite declined almost as rapidly as it rose. After the richest ore was exhausted, production fell. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake and the financial panic of 1907 made it more difficult to raise development capital. In 1908, investors in the Montgomery Shoshone Mine, concerned that it was overvalued, ordered an independent study. When the study's findings proved unfavorable, the company's stock value crashed, further restricting funding. By the end of 1910, the mine was operating at a loss, and it closed in 1911. By this time, many out-of-work miners had moved elsewhere, and Rhyolite's population dropped well below 1,000. By 1920, it was close to zero.

After 1920, Rhyolite and its ruins became a tourist attraction and a setting for motion pictures. Most of its buildings crumbled, were salvaged for building materials, or were moved to nearby Beatty or other towns, although the railway depot and a house made chiefly of empty bottles were repaired and preserved.


I love ghost towns and the thought of what might be.
Did I mention the weather was exciting? The was the first time we'd ever been rained on while in Death Valley. It was exhilarating and a bit frightening. Flash floods are a big danger here.
Our last stop was at the Keane Wonder Mine.
"Death Valley became a place of legend for people traveling westward, for its extremes and its potential as a place to strike it rich. The modern history of the park is still visible when you visit today due to its status as a protected landscape. There are over 18,000 mining features, including structures such as the aerial tramway towers and terminals at the Keane Wonder Mine. These impressive pieces of our past inspire us to imagine one of many similar stories that took place across not only Death Valley, but much of the west."
"Claims were staked in December of 1903, and by 1907 the Keane Wonder Mine was in full operation. The ore buckets you can still observe along the mile-long aerial tramway would have transported 70 tons of gold ore a day during peak production. The extreme environmental conditions that are present in the park today were a factor in the lives of the workers at the mine. Summer temperatures that limit our daytime activities caused equipment to overheat. Reduced spring output made water less abundant and limited production."

"By 1912, the value of the Keane Wonder Mine ebbed with a lack of raw material to continue mining profitably, and by 1942 the last attempt to continue operations came to a close. The preserved structures at Keane Wonder inspire us to imagine the miners who walked these same trails in search of a different value in the landscape."


Each time we return to Death Valley we are as awed as the times before. There is so much to discover in this the "Hottest, Driest and Lowest National Park".

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Offline for My Birthday

Tomorrow, I turn 60. Steve and I are going off the grid, unplugging and just being with family for a few days. I will fill you in when we return.

My birthday also marks the occasion where my middle brother Larry and I become the same age for the next 37 days! What were my parents thinking? Craziness. Let the merriment begin.

“With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come.” ― William Shakespeare

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Oceanside for Art & Sun...

After fueling up at Parlor Doughnuts, Steve and I returned to The Seabird to see what was new in its art gallery.


Right at the entrance to the hotel I spotted this new installation. Oh man, I so want this luggage cart. So very, very cool.
Oceanside Museum of Art West changes its exhibits every four months. The current one is titled A Brief Look Back.
"Experience a snapshot of OMA's exhibition history with a selection of works from the museum's permanent collection. Celebrating work by Southern California artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, OMA's exhibitions have spanned the gamut of styles and media from representational to abstract, traditional to surreal-but always exploring the relevant, engaging, and truly remarkable artwork of Southern California's community and art history. This exhibition provides a peek into ten of OMA's historic exhibitions that included work by Ethel Greene, Kai, DeLoss McGraw, Marjorie Nodelman, Marcos Ramírez ERRE, Roland Reiss, Allison Renshaw, Nicholas Samaras, Italo Scanga, and Durre Waseem."
There was something for every art lover here including Flavia Gilmore's For Your Own Good. "In her playful assemblages, Flavia Gilmore creates surprising juxtapositions of utilitarian objects that evoke a poignant look at consumer culture. Primarily working with found material and domestic debris, Ms. Gilmore is drawn to objects that carry vestiges of memory evoked by their previous life, from scrap metal and wood, machine parts, tools and toys to paper from food products, Gilmore has an uncanny ability, parallel to that of an alchemist, to transform the most unlikely discarded materials into a work of art."

Kai's Love vs. Money was done in cement. The description was interesting, "The street has long been a site for unmediated political commentary. From calls to save the environment to in-depth criticism of local and national politics, artists acting upon their convictions have successfully empowered, motivated, and challenged important social, political, and environmental ideas forward in the best venue they know the street. This is especially true in Southern California where the street is a continuous site for political engagement and debate.

Through a simple and almost naive style, Kai manages to include images and meaningful messages. He has left these plaques cemented into walls all over the world, including New York, Miami, Aspen, and Paris."
Nicholas Samaras' Rosebud was first on view in an art exhibit called Liquid Capture: Masters of Underwater Photography. It was beautiful


After ogling art, we got out in the sunshine and strolled the historic Oceanside Pier (1926). With temps reaching 80° we were definitely in the right spot.
We stood, mesmerized, looking down at this man creating swirls in the sand. The photo doesn't do it justice.

Oceanside is exactly one hour from Temecula and sits at a crossroads to places we sometimes need to get to. A detour there is good for our souls. There is just something magical about the beach.

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