Death Valley National Park

Elise and I started off our day by doing a walk through Golden Canyon. In fact, we started it twice, since the first time I had to go back and get the canteen I had left at our campsite. Even so, we started walking before 7:30, when it was still relatively cool. The canyon was beautiful with high almost lifeless cliffs of various shades of brown on both sides of us. Apparently the rock does not absorb water and the little rain that does fall on it only serves to wash away whatever soil might form. In spite of all that, we did see a few plants and even a small lizard scampering around. Mother Nature just does not give up!

The walk was about a mile and fairly level. Near the end of it, there was a trailhead for Zabriski Point, one of the higher peaks in the park, but only another mile and a half from where we were. We started to climb it and got up to just below the peak, when Elise decided that we had done enough. We paused long enough to enjoy watching the sun rise and light up the mountains around us and then headed back down. We missed a turn coming down, but apparently all paths from Zybriski Peak lead back down to the Canyon, so we ended up not too far from where we had begun. This was somewhat of a relief since the park brochures warn of the importance of carrying enough water and include cautionary tales of people who made a wrong turn on a hot day and died in Death Valley. In any event we were back at our car by 9:15, when it was just starting to get really hot.
Later on our way driving out of the valley, we took a side road that went to a lookout with a
good view of Zybriski Peak. There were lots of cars and tourists, unlike the path we had walked, where we didn't see anyone else.

 

                                             pond in Ash Meadow Nature Preserve in Death Valley

 
Our next stop was the Ash Meadow Nature Preserve at the edge of the park. We did a couple of short walks on boardwalks - the first one to a pool, a beautiful shade of blue and containing small light blue fish ((pupfish) that exist only here. I have to admit that the fish themselves were not very impressive - only about an inch-and-a-half long and looking more like tadpoles than anything else, but the view as a whole was quite beautiful. The walk on the second boardwalk also took us to a natural spring, and just to come upon water anywhere in the desert is an impressive sight.

We camped that night at an almost empty campground at the edge of Shoshone, a town with a gas station, a general store, a museum, an area joint elementary school and high school and not much else. The town is named after the Shoshone Indians who used to live in the area. I asked the lady at the museum about them. She said there weren't many left. Why was I not surprised?
One of the nice features of the campground was a swimming pool with water from an underground hot spring. The water was so warm that even I went in and enjoyed it, even though I'm not usually very enthusiastic about swimming..