Death Valley

I recently spent a great couple of days camping and hiking with Erinn and my friend Matt in Death Valley National Park. I don’t think it rose above the low 80s during our visit, which was perfect for long days of exploring. It won’t be long before the summer temperatures start moving toward 120 degrees, at which point I would not want to be there! We did all of the usual stuff while there, getting up early for sunrise at the Eureka Sand Dunes on the first morning and Zabriskie Point on the second. We spent a couple of hours hunting for a 110-foot waterfall that we found out the next day had long ago dried up (not sure if the park ranger who sent us out there was messing with us or just didn’t know?), visited the salt flats at the Badwater Basin, and brought plenty of great food to grill up once the sun had set. One unusual aspect of our visit was that the park has had more rain in the first 3 months of the year than it normally receives in a year, which left pools of water over the normally parched salt flats. It was pretty and also interesting to see the salt crystals taking form in the water. The last photo in this entry is indeed a scorpion, which I spotted underneath Matt’s tent as we were packing up on the final morning. We did not, however, eat the scorpion, as the photo might imply. Just a way to examine it before tossing it back into the brush. Until this moment, we hadn’t seen any significant wildlife during our 48+ hour visit. It was a funny parallel to our previous visit to Joshua Tree N.P., where we also didn’t see anything until a rattlesnake crossed our paths on our very last hike before heading home.