A Damplander in the Desert

Death Valley gets hot. The highest temperature ever recorded in North America—a staggering 134 degrees Fahrenheit—was recorded here.  In the shade.  It doesn’t get much water, either.  Death Valley averages 1.7 inches of precipitation annually, and some years there is no measurable moisture recorded at all. 

So I was surprised when I got an email proposing a trip to this daunting corner of the Mojave Desert from my friend and colleague Jasmine Minbashian.  Like me, she is personally inclined and professionally dedicated to the soggy states.  But the desert isn’t so dry this year, and if the news reports were to be believed, there were once-in-a-lifetime experiences to be had east of southern California’s smog belt. 

By the middle of March, Death Valley had received almost seven inches of rain. 

Seven inches of rain is not a big deal in Oregon.  The steady drizzle grows lots of vegetation, which becomes a rich layer of humus soil that absorbs the water, releasing it slowly throughout the year. 

In the desert, the rains are an intense natural drama.  The sparse vegetation can’t drink fast enough.  Mineral soils quickly become saturated, and torrents of water roar out of mountain canyonlands, depositing soil, gravel and giant boulders miles downhill.

When the rains cease, the entertainment has only begun for serious devotees of the desert.  Locked in the debris flows are the seeds of millions of flowers that transform the monochromatic tones of the valley floor.  The record rains of 2005 have created not a riot of color, but a full-scale insurgency of brilliant hues that have jammed desert highways with tens of thousands of visitors from across the globe, all of them eager to witness the best wildflower season ever seen in the valley. 

Death Valley has always been a beguiling, if difficult destination.  One of the first books to popularize the area was Edna Brush Perkins’ 1922 classic, The White Heart of the Mojave. 

Perkins and her traveling companion, Charlotte Hannah’s Jordan, were unconstrained by convention.  Both were wealthy, Perkins the daughter of an inventor living on “Millionaires Row” in Cleveland, and Jordan the daughter of a wealthy automobile manufacturer.  Both were mothers and wives, and both were ardent activists for the suffragist cause.  They picked Death Valley as a vacation spot because “The white blank on the map looked wild and lonely… like a tiger, terrible and fascinating.” 

They were warned it was no place for decent people. 

Our friends drew a dismal picture of us sitting out in the sagebrush beside a disabled car and slowly starving to death.

“You could not fix it,” they said, “and what would you do?”
We suggested that we might wait until somebody came along. 
They assured us that nobody ever came along.

Undeterred, they descended into Death Valley in the spring of 1920, in a wagon pulled by two mules, with a laconic deputy sheriff they dubbed “The Worrier,” as their guide.  Their destination, was “the white heart of the Mojave,” the shimmering salt flats of Badwater Basin, almost three hundred feet below sea level.   

Water flows into Badwater Basin, but it doesn’t flow out.  When the water evaporates, salt compounds suspended in the annual floods collect on the valley floor.  In some areas, like “The Devil’s Golf Course,” the pallid salt deposits have been carved into frightening shapes by the action of wind and water. 

Jasmine and I found the basin still covered with water, more water than anyone living can remember.  Hundreds of vacationers are taking advantage, cavorting in canoes, kayaks, and innertubes, wading up to their necks, sinking into deep black mud. 

Death Valley is one of the most dramatic trenches in the world.  Eons ago, massive tectonic plates collided, shoving trillions of tons of rock skyward.  The bedrock between mountain ranges collapsed below sea level.  Today, the snow-capped Panamint Range towers 12,000 feet above the chocolate waters of Badwater, just twenty miles away.  Beyond Badwater and the salt flats are dusty, rock littered soils, broken by tall golden sand dunes.  Across the valley floor are scattered a hundred shades of green, from chartreuse sage to emerald mint and buckwheat. 

The oldest and most prevalent shrubs are the spiny tentacled creosote bushes, dotted with small yellow flowers.  Most of the bushes are actually clones from a parent plant in the center of a slowly expanding “fairy ring” of plants.  Some of these colonies are more than 9,000 years old. 

The long jagged canyons reaching deep into the Panamints dominate the view from the valley floor.  At the base of these canyons lie broad alluvial fans, some hundreds of feet tall and almost a mile wide, where gravel ripped loose from the sides of mountains by flash floods have come to rest.  The gentle arc of gravel is covered by a blanket of “desert sunflower” (Geraea canescens), a tall, fragrant yellow flower.  Clinging to the sides of the canyons are purple primrose, the pale white sheen of the “gravel ghost” flower, and blood red cactus flowers, resting like a glass of burgundy on a bed of razor sharp needles. 

The oddest sight are the dodder plants (Cuscuta denticula), a strangling member of the morninglory family that envelopes small shrubs with a spongy, orange mat.  To us, the bright orange balls of dodder on the salt flats look like a field of pumpkins on an early morning frost. 

A record crop of wildflowers has bred a hoard of painted lady butterflies (Vanessa cardui) that feed on the nectar of tall plants like the desert sunflower.  We sip coffee at camp in the morning, as clouds of the orange-tan butterflies drift over our heads, blown north to the rainy forests and meadows of southern Oregon to breed. 

In Perkins’ time, a steady stream of hardy pioneers, miners, ranchers and farmers were trying to make a buck off the blistering white sands and shady canyons of Death Valley. Wildcatters even saw money in the mud, rich in ulexite and borax.  Beginning in the 1880s, 20 mule teams made the 165 mile trek across the oven surface of the valley carrying loads of borax that were used in the manufacture of everything from soap to explosives. 

Today, only ruins record the broken dreams of miners, farmers, ranchers, and missionaries.  The scenery is the only thing that’s ever paid.  Today, more than a million and a half visitors clog California 190, a ribbon of pavement that bisects Death Valley.  The valley itself is the centerpiece of a 3.7 million acre National Park, the largest Park outside of Alaska. 

Which is not to say that Death Valley is safe or comfortable.  The visitor center at Furnace Creek is one big liability disclaimer:  Drink water, don’t touch snakes, don’t put your hand anywhere you can’t see, drink water, don’t walk on sandy soil in the middle of the day (it can reach a temperature of 200 degrees), drink water, tell someone where you’re going.  Bring lots of water. 

In the spring and summer, sudden sand storms attack visitors, in Perkins’ words “like an army of giants in bright armor.”  Swirling sand gums up camera shutters, air conditioners, nostrils and more.  When the winds swirl through the valley, traffic slows to a crawl, and the host of tourists retreat to their vehicles.  When Jasmine and I tried to beat the crowds by driving almost impassable roads into the canyonlands, fifty mile per hour winds bent our tent poles almost double.

There is payoff for the discomfort.  On our last day in the valley, the storm clouds lifted in the late afternoon as the sun sank below the black mountains.  We watched a shadow march swiftly across the valley.  The bright yellow flowers glowed briefly, before their luster was extinguished by the shadow.  As the last rays of the sun threw shafts of devilish light across the valley, the gunmetal sheen of the black mountains to the east turned a fiery crimson.  The empty sky was streaked with red as a ghostly full moon rose over the Funeral Mountains. 

We visitors from the damplands pointed our gasoline powered wagon north to the land of demure rains and sedate scenery. 

“If you go there,” a famous old-timer told Perkins, “You will see something you’ll never see anywhere else in the world.”