Death Valley Delights

By Jacqueline Savaiano

Death Valley. The very name repels. So do the superlatives: the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere (282 ft. below sea level), one of the hottest places on earth (record high: 134DEGF) and one of the dryest (average annual rainfall: 1.8 in.). A vast stretch of nothingness. Boring. Bleak. Empty. Right?

Dead wrong. The 3.3 million-acre Death Valley National Park--about 300 miles northeast of Los Angeles and 120 miles northwest of Las Vegas--is a major tourist attraction set in one of the most beautiful and varied terrains known to man. It's filled with Wild West history, year-round social activities and amenities ranging from campgrounds for the RV crowd to the historic Furnace Creek Inn & Ranch Resort for first-class comfort and Old World charm.

One million people make the pilgrimage to Death Valley each year, many as returnees. During a recent visit, I spotted signatures in the hotel registry from Massachusetts, Tennessee, Michigan, Nevada, California and Australia. I ran into a Russian couple on a hiking trail, a German family in the visitor's center and a French family in my hotel. "Because there is no desert in Europe, Europeans come to experience the extremes," says Toni Jepson, manager of public relations for Furnace Creek Inn & Ranch. "They are almost disappointed if they don't feel 120-o."

Although there are plenty of activities for the young--bike trips, hikes in the numerous canyons and swimming at the family-oriented Furnace Creek Ranch--Death Valley has become especially popular with middle-age vacationers and retirees. The 45-and-older set represents the majority of the 500 residents who work as store clerks, waiters, registrars, maids and guides. "The young look for excitement, the older for peace," says Jepson, 60. Jepson and her husband Calvin, 57, the Inn & Ranch's general manager, came to work for only two years but decided to stay indefinitely. "We grew to love the uncluttered lifestyle," she says.

Serenity was not what the original visitors found when they entered the valley in December 1849 looking for a shortcut to California's gold. Bound in by mountains and running out of supplies, most of the would-be miners and their families hunkered down for the winter, while a two-man scouting party forged westward for help. Returning in late January, the scouts found that one man had died. The rest of the group survived by burning their wagons and slaughtering the oxen. The valley got its name, according to legend, when one woman looked back as the party was leaving and said, "Goodbye, Death Valley."

The region was eventually developed by miners, but not the Forty-Niners. You can still find remains of a few short-lived gold, silver and copper mines in the mountains, but the real fortunes in Death Valley were made with "white gold": borax. The first big operation, the Harmony Borax Works (1883-88), led to the settlement of Furnace Creek. Borates were scraped off yellow badlands in nearby Mustard Canyon, refined by Chinese laborers and pulled 165 miles to market in Mojave on the famous 20-mule-team wagons. Remnants of the original wagons, with their giant, 7-ft.-high wheels, are on display at Furnace Creek.

But the most popular tourist spot in the valley is an incongruous architectural folly known as Scottys Castle. It's named after Walter Scott, a flamboyant prospector and veteran of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, who conned a millionaire Chicago insurance executive named Albert Johnson into grubstaking a worthless mine. Johnson may have been snookered, but he was soon won over by the beauty and restorative qualities of the valley; the dry heat and clean air worked wonders with his asthma. In the late 1920s Johnson built a $2 million Spanish Colonial "vacation" hacienda with a lovely Gothic music room, handmade Spanish tiles, Italian and Mexican antiques and innovative solar-powered electrical and hot-water systems.

The other major man-made attraction is the Furnace Creek Inn itself, built in the 1920s at the base of the Funeral Mountains. With travertine walkways, red-tiled roof and elegantly understated European decor, the inn soon attracted politicians, businessmen and, in due time, the Hollywood crowd, who used Death Valley as a backdrop for hundreds of movies, television shows and commercials.

Today it's Death Valley's natural beauty that draws most visitors and brings them back for more. Well-marked hiking trails offer endless opportunities to experience at close range the raw and diverse geography created by erosion, volcanism and shifting tectonic plates. If you start at Zabriskie Point (a setting for Michelangelo Antonioni's film and the best place in the valley to watch the sun rise), you can trek down 2.8 miles past pale blue-green desert holly shrubs, sun-drenched yellow badlands, the fluted walls of Red Cathedral and the pinnacle of stately Manley Beacon and end up at the base of Golden Canyon--named for its radiance in the morning light.

For a change of scene, you can saunter along the lengthy peaks of the Sand Dunes near Stovepipe Wells, where desert winds have deposited grains of mountain quartz in a beach-like expanse that covers 15 sq. mi. Or you can visit Devil's Golf Course, where wind and rain have shaped the silt of ancient saltwater lakes into surreal crystallized salt pinnacles. And there's no place better to observe the tectonic forces that shaped Death Valley than at Badwater, the lowest place in the valley (and on the continent), where a salt-and-silt bog hundreds of feet below sea level rises abruptly to 11,049-ft. Telescope Peak 15 miles west.

Other sites are best enjoyed by car, like Ubehebe Crater, where winds scream over the rim of a stunning half-mile-wide, 500-ft.-deep crater formed 4,000 years ago, when rising molten basalt met cold, shallow groundwater. The mixture exploded violently, blowing off a massive lid of sedimentary rock and blasting cinders over 6 sq. mi. The multihued rocks that ring the interior of the crater were used for location shots in the original 1977 Star Wars.

If you prefer Nature's more subtle shades, Artists Drive is a nine-mile, one-way winding loop through the Black Mountains offering a serene showcase of volcanic rocks painted in pastels by various minerals: iron-producing reds, pinks, yellows; decomposing mica coloring rocks mint green; manganese supplying the purple. The best panoramic vista on this route is at Dantes View, where the deepest salt basin, tallest mountain, multicolored rocks and swirling sand can be savored from 5,475 ft. high in the Black Mountains.

For those who like to mix it up with other vacationers, the valley offers a long list of organized social events, including the 27.3-mile Enviro Sports running marathon through Titus Canyon in January, Planet Ultra's 200-mile bicycle rides in May and October, and the popular Death Valley '49ers Encampment in November. Some 8,000 enthusiasts flock to the encampment each fall to enjoy three days of musical performances, Western art shows and parades.

Nothing, however, can quite match the physical wonders of Death Valley, says Dave Woodruff, 49, a veteran tour guide who, after 11 seasons here, is still discovering new things. There are the mysterious moving boulders on the Racetrack's remote dry lake bed, for example, or the beehive-shaped charcoal kilns of Wildrose Canyon. Just the other day Woodruff came across a scenic Depression-era back road that runs between Furnace Creek Ranch and Stovepipe Wells. "The magic of this place," he says, "makes me hunger for Death Valley more each year."