Death Valley Day

On Saturday, March 12, 2005, Teresa and Jon had an experience that may not be repeated in our life times – we went through Death Valley with the valley in extreme bloom.

This year has been the wettest year for California on record, and that includes Death Valley. There are years in which Death Valley has NO rain at all and ,this year, it has had over 10 inches.

Many plants in the Death Valley (and high desert) area have an outer “waxy” coating that rain washes off. Until the coating washed off, the seeds simply lie dormant.

Apparently, every seed that has been dormant in Death Valley had the waxy covering washed off this year. What this means is that all the wildflowers are blooming in Death Valley: most likely “the bloom” of our life time.

Teresa and Jon heard about this and decided to go check it out.

We drove up I-15 toward Las Vegas and then turned north at Baker on CA-127. This is a two lane highway through the high desert. We were supposed to continue on CA-127 for quite a while (about 80 miles). However, the entrance to Death Valley National Monument that we were aiming for had flooded (! kid you not – doesn’t take a lot of rain there to make a flash flood – had washed out the road), so we detoured.

As it turns out, this detour was the “southern route” through Death Valley that the Rangers said had the best flowers right then. So, as usual, something that should have been inconvenient turns out to be excellent.

We had been driving at about 3,000 feet of elevation, continuing through the Mojave high desert (not a lot of sand, but bare earth and very low scrub). When we turned off, we started to climb higher.

Death Valley is a deep valley formed by plate movements (you can see the fault breaks all over the valley), surrounded on all sides by mountains. The mountains tend to get what little rain comes through the area and hems in the heat. For quite a while, Death Valley held the record for “hottest place on earth”, with a temperature of 134 degrees recorded in 1913; it is currently regarded as consistently the second hottest place (the hottest is the Dool Depression in Africa).

We were in Death Valley in March, and the temperature for us peaked at 90 degrees.

Sunflowers (look like yellow daisies) were the main flower and they were EVERYWHERE. We stopped to shoot some pictures and that is when it really came home how amazing the flower display was.

Teresa was taking pictures of the various foliages and Jon was trying to walk very carefully. Some of these seeds had been there for YEARS, waiting, and Jon was trying very hard not to step on anything growing

It was virtually impossible. When he took a hard, careful look, he discovered this:

The flower in this picture is about half an inch across and they were just about everywhere there weren’t sunflowers (as in, in the six inches between the sunflowers).

As Jon looked, he realized that there were plants all over the place. He still tried to be careful where he walked, but he couldn’t avoid them.

The rain makes everything grow, just about anywhere. This picture was taken on the face of a large (20 foot high) rock that evidently got enough water in it to cause this luxurious growth.

The southern route is about 40 miles long and the road was crowded

As we got lower, and warmer, the bloom became even more obvious.

If you check this picture, you’ll see a small white section on the cliff wall.

If you check this picture, you’ll see what that small white section says.

Here’s the explanation:

We had reached, quite literally, the low point in our journey, Badwater Basin. This is the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere.

We eventually reached the base of the valley and continued north toward Furnace Springs (the visitor center). This was when we passed Badwater Basin and took a short hike up Golden Canyon. The temperature at this point was mid-80s but the air is so dry, perspiration would evaporate at once.

We also saw where the old Borax factory (as in “20 Mule Team Borax”) used to be produced.

Furnace Springs is actually a resort area (and the place where the highest earth temperature had been recorded). It looked very nice, in March, but it would scare us to think of what it would be like in summer. Since then, Jon checked the internet and found out that it is ONLY open in the winter.

We then continued north before turning west to leave the area. We had just about lost the light when we pulled into Stovepipe Wells, another resort area. Teresa and Jon had a very nice picnic there, watching the twilight turn to dark over the desert.

The drive out was fairly long (and it was really odd to see the signs with “Elevation: Sea Level” on the way) and, unfortunately, in the dark. We do want to go back and go in from the north to see those views.

All in all, it was an experience that probably will not be repeatable in our life time, due to the abundance of bloom.