Death Valley Trip - Views from the road

2008-03-21. I took this view from the road as we drove south-east, on our way out of Death Valley.
These photos were taken out of the car window.

Death Valley Trip - Dante's View

These photos were taken from Dante's View - elevation 5,475 feet - at the crest of the Black Mountains.

Looking across the sparkling salt flats of Death Valley to the Panamints.Looking down onto Badwater.

Death Valley Trip - Zabriskie Point

The Borax Museum at Furnace Creek

2008-03-21. On our last day in Death Valley, we had breakfast at Furnace Creek. "Old Dinah", a steam tractor, and some of the ore wagons she pulled, stood outside the compound housing a motel, restaurant, shops and the Borax Museum. The building housing the Borax Museum was constructed in 1883 by F.M. "Borax" Smith, founder of the Pacific Coast Borax Co. The oldest house in Death Valley, it stood originally inTwenty Mule Team Canyon where it was office, bunk house and ore-checking station for miners at the Monte Blanco deposits. The equipment surrounding the building was used during the mining and farming periods of Death Valley and the Furnace Creek Ranch.
One the most interesting exhibits in the museum's yard is the Baldwin locomotive used to haul ore from Ryan to the Tonopah and Tidewater railroad at Death Valley Junction.
Other photos of equipment and vehicles in the Borax Museum yard are in my flickr set: 2007-03-Trip - Death Valley - Furnace Creek

Death Valley Trip - Father Crowley Point

2008-03-19. On the way back from Wildrose Canyon Kilns, we turned west onto a winding road to go to Father Crowley's Point. The site affords excellent views of the Panamint Valley and Panamint Mountains. The Panamint Dunes are also visible from the point.Colourful Rainbow Canyon runs along the western edge of the point.The point is named for Fr. John J. Crowley (1891-1940), a Catholic priest who served in the desert area in the 1920s and '30s. According to William E. Webster, "Fr. Crowley has been cited in the book, Water and Power, by William L. Kahrl, as one of the most influential advocates of tourism in an area desperately in need of economic development during the Depression years." Webster wrote a fascinating article, "Tales of The Desert Padre" about the colourful and enterprising Father Crowley in Catholic Online. It's well worth reading. For more information on Father Crowley, go to the web site "The Desert Padre." Here you'll find some of his writing and photos of some of the movie stars he befriended when they filmed in Lone Pine. 

Death Valley Trip - Wildrose Charcoal Kilns

2008-03-19. The Wildrose Charcoal kilns are located in Wildrose Canyon on the western side of Death Valley National Park. Considered to be the best surviving examples of such kilns to be found in the western states, the kilns owe their longevity to fine workmanship and to the fact that they were in use for such a short time.In 1877 George Hearst’s Modock Consolidated Mining Company completed construction of the charcoal kilns in Wildrose Canyon. The charcoal produced by the kilns was to be used as fuel for two silver-lead smelters that Hearst had built in the Argus Range 25 miles to the west. The kilns operated until the summer of 1878 when the Argus mines, due to deteriorating ore quality, closed and the furnaces shut down. The Wildrose kilns employed about 40 woodcutters and associated workmen, and the town of Wildrose, a temporary camp located somewhere nearby, was home to about 100 people. Remi Nadeau’s Cerro Gordo Freighting Company hauled the charcoal to the smelters by pack train and wagon. Each of the 10 kilns stands about 25 feet tall and has a circumference of approximately 30 feet. Each kiln held 42 cords of pinyon pine logs and would, after burning for a week, produce 2,000 bushels of charcoal.[Digital-Desert]

Death Valley Trip - Panamint Springs

2007-03-18 to 20. We spent three nights at the Panamint Springs Resort, on the west side of Death Valley National Park. It's a funky roadside motel located at an altitude of 2000 feet in the Argus Mountains. It was built in the 1937 as a wayside rest for miners travelling in and out of Death Valley. It has a good restaurant with a full menu, a gas station and convenience store, and a camp site. Across the valley one can see the spectacular west face of the Panamint Mountains, which rise to 11,000 feet. One morning, when I hiked out to the edge of the plateau, I watched two Airforce test planes racing back and forth through the valley. You can barely see one in the photo below. The Panamint Dunes are just visible in the photo below (the pale oval patch in the valley). They are reputed to be worth a visit, but they're accessible only by four-wheel drive, so we didn't venture out there. Some of the dunes rise to 250 feet. I took a telephot shot of them.

Death Valley Trip - Badwater

2008-03-18. Badwater was our second stop in Death Valley. I've already posted about the juvenile White-Crowned Sparrow I observed there , so some of this is repetition.

Badwater, a basin in California's Death Valley, has an elevation of 282 feet (86 m) below sea level. It is the lowest point in North America. The marker about mid-way up the cliff in the photo above marks Sea Level.

The site itself consists of a small spring-fed pool of water next to the road; however, the accumulated salts of the surrounding basin make it undrinkable, thus the name "Badwater". The pool does have animal and plant life, including pickleweed, aquatic insects, and the Badwater snail.The pool itself is not actually the lowest point of the basin, which is several miles to the west and varies in position. However, the salt flats are hazardous to traverse (in many cases being only a thin white crust over mud), and so the sign is at the pool.

Adjacent to the pool, where water is not always present at the surface, repeated freeze-thaw and evaporation cycles gradually pushed the thin salt crust into curiously hexagonal honeycomb shape. We didn't get out to the hexagon area, but you can see from the photo below how the salt crust gets deformed.

Death Valley - Ashford Mill Ruins

2007-03-18.  We drove into Death Valley on CA Rte 178 from Shoshone through the Salisbury and Jubilee Passes. We turned north, heading into the seemingly barren landscape.
First stop was Ashford Mill Ruins.
In 1910, Harold Ashford began work in the former claims of the Keys Gold Mining Company. In the mountains to the east Ashford and his brother worked the mine for four years without striking results. They leased the mine to B.W McClausland and his son Ross which led to the construction of a 180 ft. tunnel into the side of the mountain. The mill was built 5 miles southwest and 3,500 ft. below the mine. It employed 28 men and $100,000 worth of gold was extracted but mine expenses exceeded the profit of gold and the mine was shut down. [Mojave Desert Photo Tours web site]


There's a wonderful photo of the mill, taken in 1934, on the Calisphere (University of California) web site.

2007-03-18 - at Badwater

Salt Flats at Badwater, Death Valley, California

I've just started to edit my photos from our trip to Death Valley with my English cousins a year ago. On our first day, we stopped at Badwater.

Badwater, a basin in California's Death Valley, has an elevation of 282 feet (86 m) below sea level. It is the lowest point in North America. The site itself consists of a small spring-fed pool of water next to the road; however, the accumulated salts of the surrounding basin make it undrinkable, thus the name "Badwater". [Wickipedia]

Although the Wikipedia web site says there is animal and plant life there (pickleweed, aquatic insects and the Badwater Snail), I saw only one living non-human creature: this juvenile White-Crowned sparrow.Badwater certainly didn't seem to me to be a very hospitable place for this bird. I can only imagine that it was seeking the aquatic insects.