Death Valley Days (Well, Day) (Singular)

At the Borax Works. Without a 20-Mule Team in sight.

Today was a Death Valley Day. Just one. No need for more than that.

There were visitors visiting and one of the local tourism options selected for tourist fun was Death Valley National Park.  It's only a two-hour drive from Las Vegas, making it the closest full-fledged national park to the City of Sin.  (For what it's worth, I don't understand the phrase "full-fledged."  I'm not aware of anything ever being deemed merely "partially-fledged."  Or even unfledged.  You are either full-fledged are there is no fledging involved.  Period.  End of fledging.)

When you drive in from Las Vegas, taking the scenic shortcut of Bell Vista Road, past the Amargosa Opera House (the one in the video from Robert Plant for the song "Big Log"), down Route 190, the first scenic bit of scenery you come upon is Zabriskie Point.  This is definitely a landscape worthy of the title "other worldly":

A lot of Death Valley is flat valley, well below sea level.  Zabriskie Point is not flat and it's in the part of the park before the road surface slips below sea level.

It's been quite some time since my last trip to Death Valley, at least more than 10 years.  The Zabriskie Point area has been modernized and upgraded, with a small walkway to the viewpoint (and the least stinky outhouses I've ever smelled) (sorry for the TMI, but it's true).

 

Here is the group of us day tourists touring Death Valley on our own Death Valley Day:

From left to right:  Me.  My sister's college friend's husband.  My sister's college friend.  Those two now live in Ohio barely over the Beaver County line.  My sister.  My brother-in-law.  No names given because not everybody likes to have his or her name plastered all over the internets.  And, besides, maybe one of those people (such as, for example, me) told people they were somewhere else and that person would be revealed to be a liar if photographic proof were available on the internet that the person was instead in Death Valley.  I don't want that on my conscience.  So everyone's nameless of the Spretnak Vacation Blog.  Except the original blogging Spretnak.

The next stop was the Furnace Creek Inn.  Aren't the grounds unexpectedly green?

The Inn was built over an underground spring, so the water is locally supplied by nature and geology.  We stopped here to pay the national park admission and to eat lunch.  Turns out, because of the government shutdown, they weren't charging an entry fee.  Besides, we were all "seniors" old enough to be eligible for the lifetime national park passes, which two in the group had.  But they were charging for lunch.

Here is the historic marker marking that we are in Death Valley.

This is where we were going to make the turn to go to Badwater Basin,  At 282 feet below sea level, it is the lowest point on land in North America.  The road to Badwater Basin, unfortunately was closed.  Apparently this was due to recent flash flooding and not the government shutdown.  And Badwater Basin being 13 miles or so down the road, was too far to walk in the scorching hot Death Valley sun.  And none of us in our group wanted to become part of the history of how Death Valley got its name.

So off to the Harmony Borax Works:

Borax built Death Valley.  Borax is a mineral salt that, until the widespread use of chlorine bleach, was used as a clothing whitener.  If you in the second half of what actuarial tables would deem to be a full life, surely you remember 20-Mule Team Borax as a detergent additive for when your mothers did laundry (and back in those days only mothers did laundry because that's the way the world was back then -- only three channels on the TV and only mothers doing laundry).

They actually processed the borax ore here to get the pure white borax powder because shipping the borax otherwise would have been too expensive.  Even using a railroad and not a team of 20 mules.

And here I am posing for photo, looking just like the Chinese immigrant labor pressed into service at this borax mill at starvation wages.

After that it was off to the air-conditioned visitor center where I bought a souvenir refrigerator magnet.  And, just like that, our Death Valley Day was over.