RACING ROCKS IN A SILENT WORLD
Sand Dunes
I was climbing up a sandy hill in the moonlight. My plan was to reach the summit by sunrise and photograph the sand dunes. The night air was refreshing after I had spent the previous day in a hot and dusty sand storm. It was great to greet the morning sun casting its divine-like spell. Although nature can sometimes be mean and harsh, it is also beautiful. Consider the contradictions of nature at Death Valley.
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| Devil's Golf Course |
The valley's name dates to the California gold rush of 1849 when a group of men tried to cross the area in pursuit of riches. The group barely survived the oven-like heat and food scarcities. One escapee looked back on the valley and yelled: "Good by, Death Valley." That ominous and gloomy name has survived to the present. But the valley did not become a U. S. national park until 1994.
Summer in the valley is really "hellish." The highest recorded temperature in Death Valley was 56.7 degrees Celsius in July 1913. This is second record of 57 degrees Celsius registered in the Sahara Desert in 1922.) Yet the park has become popular. It takes only three hours of driving to reach the park from Las Vegas.
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| The Race Track |
Visitors come to enjoy the unusual scenery and temperature as well as recreational opportunities within the park. Furnace Creek has both hotel and restaurant facilities and also golf courses. Nearby are large "flats" or fields of evaporated crystal salt deposits. In a Badwater section known as the Devil's Golf Course, the salt flats are so bumpy and rough that it is said only the devil can play there. Badwater is the lowest place in the western hemisphere; it is almost 214 feet below sea level.
The most unusual natural phenomenon is a dry two-to-three mile long oval lake in the Racetrack Valley. This ancient lake is more than thirty-five miles southwest of Scotty's Castle located within the northern edge of Death Valley. The somewhat dangerous and narrow gravelly Racetrack Valley Road provides access to the lake whose bottom is like a "racing car track" for rocks of varying sizes. The rocks leave "tread" or track marks in the mud that sometimes is wet or icy. Winds may push them across the moist muddy surfaces. But there is no satisfactory explanation for the movement of the rocks. Undoubtedly, sudden weather changes and strong winds as well as the consistency of the mud have had something to do with the phenomenon.
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| Salt Flat at Badwater |
The racing rocks left me amazed as I pondered them in the silent valley. I was in a reverie thinking about this unreal world that has no equal elsewhere. Surely every other visitor speculates as I did about the origin of the rock races. It was soon time to return to reality and leave the Racetrack Valley.
Before returning to reality on my four trips to the Death Valley National Park, however, I stopped at hot spring baths outside the park's boundaries. In 1906 two bath houses were erected in Beatty, Nevada next to natural artesian hot springs that still bubble. Water temperatures range between 98 and 105 degrees or "hot, hotter and hottest." One of the houses is divided into three private soaking pools. Another more elaborate establishment maintains hot spring baths south of the park near the town of Shoshone, California that is closer to Reno than Beatty. Although these two hot spring baths are not like the ones that I visited in my native Japan, I enjoyed them. In Japan visiting a hot spring bath is much like taking a full-time vacation. Japanese bathers focus both on soaking in hot waters and other relaxing and restful activities. Here, on the other hand, my visits at the hot springs were limited mainly to bathing. It was a heavenly experience to relax my muscles. And I could still forget the tensions of modern living before returning to the workaday world.
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Death Valley National Park P.O. Box 579, Death Valley, CA 92328-0570 Phone: 760-786-2331 www.nps.gov/deva |