Happy New Year, everyone!

Well, technically, for me, it’s been the new year for about nine days, but even beavers (perhaps especially beavers) have to go with the flow. In any case, having bid farewell to Woodchuck, who sent me off with a brand new hat, I stopped in Death Valley National Park, a vast stretch of dry graben as delightful in the winter as it is deadly in the summer!

You may think Death Valley would be a grim place to enter the New Year, but I found it to be quite the opposite! In fact, lots of other people agreed with me, considering I just squeezed into the last campsite at Furnace Creek before it filled up for the weekend! The crowds and sandy ground made it tricky to get a site and set up the tent, but I, like the students in Les Miserables, would not back down!

When I finally got the tent to stand up, I realized my appetite was standing up too, so I moseyed over to the Wrangler Steakhouse, where a line was already forming. Ye revelers be warned! The New Year’s Special Menu was basically the same as the regular menu, only $10 more expensive! In fact, since the park is so remote, the audience is helpless to resist price gouging on all fronts! Fortunately, I was saved from taking out a mortgage on dinner by a really great family, who adopted me for the evening and added me to their bill! We laughed and swapped stories for hours, and it turned into a really marvelous New Year’s Eve. I did not stay up until midnight, though, because I really wanted to see the first sunrise of 2012. And so I did.

When I got to Zabriskie Point at 6:30 in the morning, I was hardly the first on the scene. There were cameras and tripods lining the bluff over Golden Canyon, though fortunately, no territorial disputes broke out while I was there. Zabriskie Point takes its name from Chris Zabriskie, who spent 48 years working for the Pacific Coast Borax Company that first gave Death Valley a reputation other than heck on earth. The spectacular formations came from deposits of mud, sand, and volcanic ash in an ancient lake, which dried up and left behind the eroding badlands. This created one spectacular landscape that I just had to explore!

Several trails wind down from Zabriskie Point into Golden Canyon. It’s a 2 1/2 mile walk through some of the most otherworldly terrain I’ve ever seen. In fact, several scenes from Star Wars Episode IV took place right here! I could feel the Force guide me down past Manly Beacon, and I wondered why there are no signs advising visitors to stay on the trails. This may be because, in the badlands, there are very few plants to disturb and no cryptobiotic crust at all. It may also be that this whole valley is like a giant Etch-A-Sketch: no matter how many footprints dig into it, when you add some rain and wind, and shake it all up with an earthquake, all the footprints will be erased! I thought that was neat!

After a great hike and much needed rehydration, I went to see some of the local Historical Landmarks, most of which center on the Borax Industry and its famous 20-mule teams. Now, what is borax, you may ask? Why, it’s Na₂B₄O₇·10H₂O of course! You know, sodium borate! A crystalline boron compound! Not ringing any bells? Well, you’ve probably run into it before! It’s used to clean laundry, glaze pottery, preserve and embalm, and even make fiberglass! Just don’t give it to your pet ant farm, because it mixes with water to make boric acid, which shuts down an ant’s digestive system! Oh my! Anyway, I visited the Old Harmony Borax Works, where the crystals were refined after being scraped off the salt flats, then shipped by mule train all the way to Mojave: 165 miles in 20 days! Even though there was so much great information here, I had to wonder what sort of person, alone in the desert, would look at his feet and think, “My gosh! Borax! I’m rich!”

With history in the past, I pushed downward, further down, in fact, than I’d ever been before, right into the Badwater Basin, the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere! When I say it’s low, I don’t mean it’s banal or out of sorts; it is literally 282 feet below sea level, and all that extra O₂ turns it into a major pressure cooker in the summer time! On July 10th, 1913, a temperature of 134°F was recorded near here in Furnace Creek! (That’s 57°C!) All that can really exist out here are a couple rare snails and the salt that gives Badwater its name. See, an early surveyor passing through the area stopped to let his mule have a drink, but it refused, thus leaving the area to be known for “bad water.” The salt, while not good for summer drinking, is actually pretty neat when you walk on it. The constant evaporation breaks it into rough polygons that are surprisingly durable when you walk on them. Then again, I don’t weigh much, so it may work differently for humans!

Finally, there is nothing like a good frolic in the sand to cap off a really great trip. The Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes are the perfect spot for just such a thing. These dunes sit in the middle of the valley and don’t really go anywhere, as the wind blows them back and forth. In good weather, you can see the tracks of all the people who have passed over the dunes, but once the wind starts in, the Etch-A-Sketch Effect takes over!

This really is a neat park, and being here really reminded me of how much there is to see in National Parks! I still have to come back to see Scotty’s Castle, the Racetrack, and the one remaining landmark that is 16 miles down a washboard road! We’ll make that a New Year’s resolution!

Resolving to see you again!