Death Valley National Park in Winter

We spent Christmas in Death Valley National Park where my parents spend the winter months working.  This has become an annual tradition in our family.  This is the fourth Christmas we've spent together in Death Valley and since this is the largest National Park in the United States outside of Alaska, we are still exploring new things each year.  Come take a look at the enormous variety the Park has to offer visitors.
  

If you are approaching Death Valley from Interstate 15 via Baker, take a side road to Dante's View soon after you enter the Park.  Up at 5,475 feet in elevation, you will be rewarded with a grand vista of the salt flats of the Death Valley at Badwater and the surrounding mountains.

Zabrinski's Point is another overlook on your way into the Park and you can see some incredible badlands here.  Zabrinksi's Point is a wonderful place for capturing a morning sunrise.

You can walk through these badlands for an easy hour long hike to Golden Canyon.

Several times a week, rangers offer guided walking tours through Golden Canyon in the late afternoon when the sun lights up this canyon to a beautiful hue.

No trip to Death Valley is complete without a stop at Badwater.  This is the lowest point in the United States at 282 feet below sealevel.

Since Death Valley is a place of extremes, it should come as no surprise that directly across the saltflats from Badwater is one of the highest peaks in the United States: the snow-covered Telescope Peak rising up to 11,049 feet.

This view of Telescope Peak is especially impressive because unlike most high mountains, this one has no foothills to obstruct the extreme slope.  Some hikers enjoy challenging themselves on this 22 mile hike from Badwater to the top of Telescope peak.


This fresh water spring in the middle of one of the hottest deserts in the world is called Badwater when miners' mules refused to drink this water because of the salts around the edge.

The saltflats at Badwater form natural hexigonal shapes.

My children love playing at Devil's Golfcourse.

You need to be very careful here though: this rugged ground is very sharp and can even break bones if you trip.

Artist's Drive is a nine mile one-way scenic road near Badwater that loops and dips through some colorful badlands.

 The many minerals paint the hillside vivid colors.  This point is called Artist's Palette.

A trail winds through these hills so you can see the colors up close.

After all this activity, it is nice to take a break at the historic Furnace Creek Inn which has been an elegant fixture here since 1927.

After being in the hottest part of Death Valley all morning, it is nice to sit in the shaded oasis of the Inn's gardens.

This pond is my favorite place in the gardens.

Natural spring water keeps the swimming pool a comfortable 85 degrees year round.

Let's hit the road again and explore the area around Stovepipe Wells.  A general store and less expensive lodging is available in this historic outpost founded in 1926.
 

The name comes from this watering hole that was the only reliable source of drinking water for miles.  Sandstorms often covered the top of the well so a clever pioneer stuck a stovepipe on top.

Mosaic canyon is down a three-mile, dusty, washboard rutted dirt road.  Drive very slowly if you are in a regular passenger vehicle: the canyon is worth the difficult trip.

These beautiful narrows are a geologic wonder.  Flash floods have polished the sides of the canyon's marble to a glossy sheen in many places.

It's necessary to scamper over some rocks during this hike, but if I could make it, just about anyone should be able to.

The name, Mosaic Canyon, obviously comes from these intricately patterned dolimate shards in the marble stone, just like in a fancy bathroom.

I take a much-needed break at the top.  This may have been the most challenging hike I've been on before because the surface is very slippery in places.  This hike was the highlight of the trip and worth the sore muscles.

Scotty's Castle is a tourist favorite at Death Valley.

This two million dollar mansion built in the middle of nowhere entertains visitors today with fun stories about the great talker Walter Scott, better known as Death Valley Scotty.  Scotty managed to swindle investors out of thousands of dollars by telling tall tales of gold mines he discovered in Death Valley.  An investor, Albert Johnson, came out to Death Valley to see evidence of the gold mines.  He didn't find the gold, but he loved Death Valley enough to build this winter vacation home for him and his wife. 
 

Scotty told everyone it was his own home, built with the proceeds of his gold fortune.

Tours of the Castle cost $11.00 and run each hour.  An entertaining guide will re-enact the wild west times that Scotty lived in.

 The uniqueness of the interior of castle is well worth seeing.

While you are waiting for your tour to begin, it is fun to explore the grounds and the many other buildings that Albert Johnson built.  A friendly coyote will likely greet you.

Next stop is the most unusual Ubehebe Crater in the Cottonwood Mountains, which means basket in the rocks.  This is a very recent volcanic eruption, only 6,000 years ago, when underground water came into contact with molten rock and made a huge explosion.
 

You can walk either around the Crater, or down to the bottom: a descent of more than 500 feet.

We decided to hike up to the Little Hebe Crater.  However, when we thought we had crested this very steep and slippery incline, we saw that we had another large hill to climb.  My legs protested all this exercise and I had to promise myself that next time I'll visit Little Hebe Crater.

If you are fortunate enough to drive a 4 wheel drive vehicle, you can go see the very mysterious and beautiful racetrack.  This place has giant boulders that are making tracks through the rutted surface of the valley.  No one has ever seen the rocks moving, but scientists believe that the extreme winds coupled with a wet surface move the boulders.

Titus Canyon is another fantastic place of narrow canyon walls in the Grapevine Mountains.  A two-way well maintained gravel road will take you from Scotty Castle's Road to the mouth of the narrows.  If you have a 4-wheel drive vehicle, you can explore the entire Titus Canyon using a narrow 26 mile long, one-way gravel road from Rhyolite Ghost Town in Nevada: something I dream of doing one day.

The gravel road makes it easy to walk through the narrows of the canyon.  If you are very lucky, you may see native Big-horn sheep, fossils of ancient fish and plants, or Indian petrogylphs.

We saw this pretty mermaid-shaped breccia in the side of the canyon.

The sun sets suddenly in this deep canyon.  It was already after 4:00 p.m. during the shortest part of the year, and yet we were tempted by each curve in the canyon to keep on exploring.

We made it back to the mouth of the canyon just as the sun was setting.

The full moon that rose over the Grapevine mountains took our breath away.

Furnace Creek Ranch is our home-base when we are in Death Valley.

This natural oasis in the desert has been farmed since the late 1800s to provide alfalfa to the borax miner's horses and mules.  The Deglet Noir date trees were planted by the Pacific Coast Borax Company in 1924 and are still standing tall and proud.

You can learn more about borax mining in Death Valley at the Borax Museum that my father used to work at.

Taking a sunset mule carriage ride around Furnace Creek Ranch really gives you the feeling of the mining days.

If you enjoy golfing, why not play on the lowest elevation golf course in the entire world?

Since it was Christmas, Furnace Creek was preparing for the annual Christmas Eve golf cart parade.  I have proudly served as a judge of the parade for the past four years.

Very close to Furnace Creek Ranch, you can visit the ruins of the Harmony Borax Works.

The surrounding mustard canyons are beautiful to photograph while you learn how borax was mined, processed, and carried out of the desert to the train station in Mojave 165 miles away using the famous 20 mule team.

A great deal of investment was lost because borax mining was only profitable from 1882 to 1890 when large borax deposits were found much closer to the railroad in other parts of the Mojave.

Saltcreek is a great place to take a walk on a boardwalk that takes you over the creek that houses the unique Death Valley pupfish.  These small fish have adapted themselves to an increasingly saltier environment over time.  However, they have not been seen by scientists in a couple of years so perhaps this subspecies of pupfish is now extinct.  The pupfish are usually active in February. 

Other animals, such as this coyote, use the creek as a watering spot.

Devil's Cornfield, three miles away from the outpost of Stovepipe Wells, grows a crop of an unusual looking plants called the Arrowweed that can reach heights of 8 feet tall.  They get water from the same underground aquifer that put Stovepipe Wells on the map.

The sand dunes near Stovepipe Wells are my children's favorite place to explore.

There are several great sand dune locations in Death Valley, but this one is very assessible because it is right off the highway.

Desert creatures are very good at camouflage and most of them are noctural.  The many tracks you see in the sand dunes gives evidence to the vast variety of animals that make this harsh climate home.

The story of the 49ers colors every tale about Death Valley.  These unlucky gold seekers wanted to find a short-cut to the gold fields in California.  Pioneers heard how dangerous the Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevadas was after a wagon train got entrapped there in an early winter storm and folks resorted to cannibalism to survive.

The southern route on the Old Spanish Trail took months extra to travel to reach the gold fields.  This group of one-hundred travelors decided to take this shortcut they had seen on a roughly drawn map, hoping to cut off 500 miles from the trip.  They reached Death Valley on Christmas, 1849, and were dismayed to find themselves trapped in a deep valley surrounded by high mountains and very little natural food or water resourses.

After killing their oxen, burning their wagons, and nearly starving to death, two scouts, William Lewis Manley and John Rogers, made their way out of the Valley and found help and supplies 250 miles away in the San Fernando Valley.  They retraced their steps back to the starving families trapped in Death Valley and they all made their way out of Death Valley through Emigrant Pass in the Panamint Mountains.

This highway, Emigrant Canyon Road, takes you over the Panamint Mountains and reaches a height of 5,318 feet in elevation.  It also takes you through some very beautiful countryside and give you an upclose look at Telescope Peak.

A side-road to Mahogany Flat will take you within six miles of the summit of Telescope Peak: a fantastic place to take a summer hike to escape the searing heat of the valley's floor.

On the way, be sure to stop at the Charcoal Kilns, which were built by Chinese labor in 1867, to process the local pinon and juniper trees into charcoal which was used in the smelting of local gold and lead ore.


They are very impressive to walk inside of.  A smoky smell still clings to the walls.

There are ten Kilns in all, measuring 32 feet in diameter and 25 feet in height.

My Southern-California born kids got a kick out of playing in snow in what is supposed to be one of the hottest places on earth.

If you haven't been to Death Valley National Park, I hope that you will get the chance to visit this very varied and interesting place.