Do you remember, way back at the beginning of the trip when we reported on the 111 degrees at Busch Gardens in Virginia? Well Death Valley puts that to shame! It was 111 when we arrived here at 10:30 last night! Known as one of the hottest, if not the hottest, place in the country (again, possible even hemisphere, maybe even the world--for years it held the record of highest ever recorded temperature at 134 degrees fahrenheit), Death Valley routinely reaches the 120 degree range in the middle of the summer, and today was no different, reaching a brisk 122 in the middle of the afternoon. In fact, it's so hot here that Death Valley is one of the few places where summer is the off-season, where many places are closed between May and October. If you've never felt it, it's impossible to explain how such heat feels on your body, but it weighs you down from the second you are forced to endure it. You can feel it searing into every inch of your exposed skin, yet you can't even considering covering up any more because it's just too damned hot. It's not humid at all, so the air is not heavy in the thick, wet, sense of New York, but it presses down on you nonetheless. I sweated through my t-shirt in a matter of minutes. Lucky for us, most of the park can be easily explored from the car. It's really very difficult to describe what you see here though, and even the photos (http://www.flickr.com/photos/daphneseesamerica/ ) don't even come close to doing it justice. But I'll try to give it a shot anyway, so here goes.
Death Valley itself is nestled between two deceptively large mountain ranges, which is primarily what makes it so hot here (for some science-y reason that maybe Mike will attempt to explain). But it's a strange sensation to be driving in the lowest elevation in the hemisphere and be surrounded by mountains. Anyway, it is so hot and dry here (in fact, they have gone over a year without rain at times, and average yearly rainfall is only a measly two inches), that any lakes that used to exist have long since dried up, leaving vast areas of salt rock and salt flats. At times, the salt is so thick that the valley is just pure white, ironically giving the illusion of looking at snow. So much so that at one point when you can get out and walk on it, I actually expected it to be slippery, almost like an ice skating rink, until the very moment I put my foot down. Strangely, though, at Badwater Basin, which is the lowest elevation at 282 feet below sea level and the place where you can actually walk on the salt flats, there's also a small pool of water (which again is explained by some science-y stuff that has to do with it being so far below sea level that the water is actually coming up through the ground).
So you have these vast expanses of whiteness from the salt, but surrounding them are the most brilliantly colored mountains we've seen yet, with vibrant greens (mostly from salt deposits), pinks, purples, reds, and yellows. And not only that, but a lot of the rocks have been pushed and turned on their side or at an angle (insert another science-y explanation here) so the colors form fascinating diagonal stripes and rocks stick out of the ground at odd angles. And when it does rain, the ground is so dry that it can't absorb any water, so the water flows and flows through the mountains down toward the valley, and picks up so much power that it carves out beautiful ridges in the mountainside. It is truly a beautiful sight to behold, and pretty much worth enduring the sweltering heat, especially since we're mostly able to just go from air conditioned car to air conditioned building.
states driven through: 20
states visited: 13
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