Day 8: The Valley of Death

Yea, though I walk through the shadow of the Valley of Death, I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me; thy PowerBook and thy GPS they comfort me.

The evils of Nevada are manifold, but most of them were made up for by the friendly inhabitants of the small town of Beatty, NV, where we stayed last night. Sure, the town is only about two steps from being a ghost town (and, in fact, it's only a few miles down the road from the remains of Rhyolite, NV, which is a ghost town), but the people there are great folks.

You might have guessed from the title of this particular day, that we spent some time in California's Death Valley. If you did guess that, you're absolutely right. Mostly, we wanted to see the altitude meter on the GPS go negative (since the floor of Death Valley is below sea level). Yes, we are geeks.

Having crossed over the Funeral Mountains, leaving the searing landscape of Nevada behind us, we descended into the deep, weird depths of Death Valley. The mountains leap as high as eleven thousand feet around this mysterious plain, but down below among the salt pans and brackish pools of dark water, it is well below sea level. Indeed, that was part of the point of going to Death Valley -- we wanted to see if the GPS would display negative altitude (it did).

From Death Valley, we climbed up the winding mountain roads that led us through Yosemite National Park. This is a region beautiful beyond description, although as we were passing through it this evening, it was quickly gathering dusk, so we did not see much. We will be going back there tomorrow to visit the giant sequoia trees.

Not far from the ghost town of Rhyolite, NV, we are driving up into the ashen heights of the Funeral Mountains, whence we will descend into the Stygian depths of Death Valley.

Someone once asked us, "how low can you two possibly go?" Well, here we are, the lowest point in the United States of America, at 282 feet below sea level.

We're also standing next to what appears to be the only open water in all of Death Valley.

There must have been water in the valley at some point, but when it departed, it left behind these smooth white salt pans, where you can see us standing now.

See that tiny little white rectangle, in the middle of the picture and about a quarter of the way down? That sign reads "Sea level". That's about two hundred eighty two feet above our feet.

Following in our usual tradition, David has lovingly constructed this panorama of Death Valley, as viewed from the lowest point in the Valley. You can click on this image to get a bigger version of it (and we would recommend you do so, since at a quarter of its actual size, it is somewhat difficult to make out the details).

Our next stop was the Devil's Postpile. Actually, it sort of looks more like God's Toothpicks, but I guess that doesn't sound as cool as Devil's Postpile.

We tried to sneak a few of these home with us in our pockets, but the park rangers caught us as we tried unsuccessfully to walk up the slope with six hundred pounds of basalt on each hip.

Here's a close-up of some of the posts (in particular, some of the broken ones). The Devil is apparently not very careful with his materials. No wonder the gates of Hell aren't very reliable.

David almost got eaten by some kind of large tree as we were walking through the woods. Fortunately, he had brought his lighter with him, and managed to subdue the rogue gymnosperm with a blast of his trusty bic.

Here, you can see our victorious hero standing in the charred remains of the tree's once-mighty trunk.

From there, we got back into the car to cross over the mountains comprising Yosemite National Park. The sun was already getting low in the sky when we approached these beautiful peaks, but we grabbed some pictures anyway.

We'll be coming back tomorrow to get some more shots and explore a bit.

Uh oh! It appears some irresponsible camper has kicked over a bucket of water. Here you can see it pouring in a raging torrent down the mountainside.

Most people don't know this, but the Park Service actually brings in the snow for the season, once winter is over. Unfortunately, it seems they missed a bit on the side of this mountain. We'll definitely be writing to our Congressman to protest this sloppiness by the custodians of our National Park system.

Notice the altitude (marked ALT) on the GPS! Less than two hours before this, we were at -282 ft. above sea level, and now we're at 9,952 ft.

The time displayed is in the Pacific time zone, as you might expect.

Isn't the setting sun beautiful?

Aren't the mountains lovely?

Yosemite is particularly famous for "Nose Mountain", which you can see in this picture here. The "nose", as it is called, is a large protuberance of dark volcanic rock which absorbs sunlight quite effectively.

It's a long way from here to our night's rest, which wound up being in Merced, CA. However, it's kind of hard to take pictures in the dark, so when the sun left us for the day, we continued without the noble assistance of David's trusty camera.