sauergeek

We woke to the sound of an odd bird cry outside the window. I'd heard it last night as well, but was unable to identify it other than it vaguely sounded like a cat, and it was outside the hotel. It turns out there's a male peacock kept in a pen behind the hotel. He spread his tail and strutted around right outside the hotel room window for a while, then decided to have a preen on the through-the-wall air conditioner for the hotel room. Pictures forthcoming!

After admiring the peacock for a while, we headed into Death Valley, to the visitor center at Furnace Creek. We walked through their displays of the geography, history, industry, and native residents[1] of Death Valley. We saw their short introductory slide show. (Well,

jiapa saw the whole thing. I saw only part of it, as I was still meandering the displays when the slide show began). The displays are well done and give a good overview of each covered subject. The slide show summary was basically "Despite the name, this place has life aplenty. However, it can still kill you, so don't be stupid."

Breakfast was at the '49er Cafe, which is one of the Furnace Creek Ranch restaurants. We got there shortly after breakfast expired, so we had an early lunch. I had a BLT. The bacon was crisp, the bread was toasted, and they put mayo on it without me asking (which is good, for me at least). They had an option for potato salad instead of fries, which I took; the potato salad hit the spot. The potato salad had a mayo-based sauce, and was made of potatoes, celery, and an herb I couldn't easily identify -- so probably parsley.

jiapa had a grilled cheese sandwich with fries, which looked tasty, but my stomach was not up for tasting.

jiapa later said it was a bit heavy.

I discovered the cafe had a beer called Mojave Gold on tap, which I'd never heard of, so I tried it. It's a golden lager[2] by Indian Wells Brewing Company. It would do well on hot days; it is a remarkably cooling beer. It is gold colored, a bit lighter in color than a bitter, but despite being a full barley beer, cools like a wheat in summer. Lovely.

After breakfast, or lunch, or whatever you want to call it, we started down the Badwater Road, south from Furnace Creek. Nearly everything that could be green along the way was. It's amazing how much life a desert can support! We stopped at several places. The Devil's Golf Course is a huge field of salt formations that regularly get rebuilt with occasional flash floods. They are difficult to walk through, and signs warn about it being easy to cut yourself or break bones in a fall. I'll believe it. Nearby are salt flats, but not so flat as the famous ones in northern Utah, as these are regularly flooded. They dry with ridges and cracks in them, like drying mud.

The Natural Bridge, while it is unknown how it formed, is likely an erosion artifact. It sits about half a mile up a canyon through sedimentary rock. The walls look like odd, low-stone concrete, but the sedimentary rock is strong enough to show distinct fracture lines, instead of merely disintegrating when it shifts. There are a lot of beautifully colored rocks just sitting on the floor of the canyon.

Badwater itself is the lowest point in the park, 282' (or 85.5m) below sea level. It is apparently wet year-round. However, because this variably-sized pool is sitting in a salt pan, it is enormously salty, with an undrinkable combination of salts in the water, thus the name "Badwater". There are places in the pool where salt formations (a la the Devil's Golf Course) stick out of the water -- they do not appear to dissolve. Despite this, there are bugs and snails that live in the pool. On the way south from Badwater, we saw a huge field full, from mountain to road, of yellow wildflowers.

Our southernmost point, where we turned around and headed north again, was the ruins of the Ashford Mill. The ruins are of an old gold ore processing facility, for a mine about five miles distant. Not much is left but some stone walls and foundations, some wooden beams, and a bit of iron or steel hardware that I'd have to research to know what it was for.

On the way back north we picked up Artist's Drive, which gets you close to an astonishingly colorful set of mountains and foothills. The mountains, as far as I can tell, are entirely bare rock -- there is no visible soil on them, and nothing grows on them that I could see. There's just bare rock, exposed to everything, and the rock (especially the patterns in it) is gorgeous. A side spur off Artist's Drive is Artist's Palette, which gets you close enough to some of the foothills that you can walk in the washes between them. It's pretty, but it would be a horrible place to be caught in a flash flood. By this time, the light was fading, and sunset looked iffy due to clouds coming over. We omitted a planned stop at Golden Canyon because of this. Instead, we headed out of the park to get dinner.

Dinner was at the Longstreet Casino, seven miles away from and just over the Nevada border from Death Valley Junction. I'd forgotten that Nevada does not have a general smoking ban[4]. The casino restaurant was right on the floor with their slot machines. Dinner was a chef's salad for each of us, plus a cup of chili for me and a bowl of cream of potato soup for

jiapa. Their idea of "mixed greens" in the chef's salad is iceberg lettuce and cabbage. The salads were acceptable, if unexceptional. The chili was OK, but nothing to write home about. The only beer available was in bottles; nothing was on tap. I was progressively more underwhelmed by the salad the more I ate. Given a choice, I'll take the '49er Cafe instead. Or KFC. Or McDonald's. Not recommended.

Tomorrow we go to various stops in the northern part of Death Valley. If things go as planned, dinner will be in Beatty, NV, just outside the National Park.

1. Yes, there are permanent residents of Death Valley, even today: a tribe of Shoshone Indians.

2. Translation: an American-style premium pilsner, i.e. Bud, but without the volume of "adjuncts"[3] that Bud uses. For the formal description of the style, see the style description page for the World Beer Championship, hosted by the Brewers Association. You'll have to search for the phrase "American-style premium pilsner".

3. Rice and other flavorless fillers.

4. California, like Massachusetts, does have a general smoking ban. I love them. You can actually go into a bar or a club and not reek of old cigarette smoke afterward!