Outside Vegas is a desolation of strip malls, old tiki bars, krav maga dojos, and 24-hour liquor-and-slots operations. There's a glum sign spinner on an empty street corner; his sign says "REPTILES->". There are tumbleweeds heaped up in the highway median.
The way on to Death Valley goes down arrow-straight highways where you could fall asleep at the wheel and wake up refreshed and closer to your destination. Pahrump is the first of the many grim desert towns we come to. It exists, judging from the billboards, to sell fireworks to Californians, and has minor sidelines in blackjack, cannabis, and jerky. There are housing developments and RV parks on one side of the highway, and fireworks stores on the other. It's hard to know what you'd do with your time if you lived in Pahrump, but it's a glittering metropolis compared to some of the places we pass through later.
We're staying in the Shoshone eco-village, mislabeled on many maps as the Shoshone Trailer and RV Park. It backs onto Death Valley High School ("Home of the Scorpions"). Beside that is a tiny, slightly sulphurous wetland surrounding a warm spring. The landscaping and the boardwalks are the work of the Amargosa Vole Team, which has been working to lure back the Amargosa Vole, an endangered subspecies. It might be working, because we see a bobcat. This is also where you'll find the Shoshone Historical District, which comprises a single ruined cabin and a fading sign that says, "Shoshone Historical District". It's not a big cabin, or a very old cabin, but it's impressively ruinous; you don't want to sneeze while you're inside. Also, a swimming pool, filled by the spring, surrounded by a barbed wire-topped chain-link fence.
I went to DV because a couple of friends, Jaclyn and Jason, brought me along. Their role in the operation was to do everything; they're energetic planners, which makes us complementary. It's discouraging for planners when there's no one to follow along and take advantage of their work. I was also able to pitch in with some bad navigating, by having the Google Maps irritating lady-voice talk over everyone while we were in the car, and by holding up hikes by stopping to stare at piles of old tin cans and broken-down cars. These are the kinds of challenges good planners relish. Angela and Donna, more old friends, also turned up for a couple of days, and hung out in our trailer and came along for hikes. It was harder to counterbalance 4 well-organized, industrious people, but I did what I could.
Death Valley is vast and contains amazing variety, within a certain narrow range. Around Shoshone, everything is gravel and fine sand, with a spiny bush every few metres and low, dry mountain ranges in every direction. It's like the work of a great artist who works only in brown. Further in are canyons, badlands, salt flats, and more mountain ranges, with lower isolated peaks here and there like the tombs of lesser pharaohs. Everything is dry and quiet and more or less lifeless. You catch the earth as it really is, without its temporary covering of water and life, and realize it will still be an attractive place in two billion years.
Death Valley is weird and otherworldly, and people come here to try weird and otherworldly things: train astronauts, open unprofitable mines, make weird movies, build strange houses. It's outside the usual run of life entirely, which opens the field for eccentric optimists.
That said, it generally hasn't taken modern people long to work out Death Valley isn't a good place to live. The name wasn't given ironically or whimsically. Those who tried it were usually here for borax or gold. The first ruins you come to, driving in from Shoshone, are of a borax mill that operated for around a year, which is probably about par for the area. Most of the central valley's ruins have to do with borax: old borax mills, old borax refineries, old borax transport corridors. Borax is one of those mysterious minerals that most people don't think much about, but which is in (the plaques claim) everything. "You brush your teeth with it, you sleep in it, you drive it, you eat it, it feeds your dreams, it shapes your desires, also it is in detergent." As with the gold mining towns further out, settlement lasted for exactly as long as there was a compelling reason to stay. When the mine ran out or the deal fell through, you packed up the same day. Towns didn't linger or find new purpose; everyone just split. If things had happened in the era of the air conditioner, things might have been different -- that, and not the railway, is the invention that truly opened up these parts of the American southwest -- but probably not.
Of the many ghost towns scattered around, the most famous is Rhyolite. Rhyolite was a gold mining camp in 1905, a city of 5000 in 1907, and empty by 1920. There was a gold rush, followed by a prostitution rush, and then a general rush to deliver services to all the gold miners and prostitutes. A steel magnate from back east looked it over, decided it was a good long-term prospect, and supplied infrastructure. In this way, Rhyolite was turned almost instantly into a modern town, with nothing more than a can-do spirit, some bad mineralogical data, and a vast steel fortune. Then the mines, in that way gold mines have, turned out to be less rich than had been supposed, a wider financial crisis supervened, and within a decade or so tourists were coming to visit a ghost town.
Ghost towns hardly ever look how you want them to look. You always imagine wooden saloons with dusty player pianos and maybe a few half-drunk sarsaparillas on the bar. But most ghost towns weren't cleared out by the rapture or an H-bomb; people drink up before they abandon a town, and their next move is to dismantle and salvage anything useful. Rhyolite now is three or four ruined buildings of stone or concrete, a debris field of rusted cans, and a tiny house made of bottles embedded in concrete. The Bottle House is in good shape, despite having been abandoned in 1905, when the last lollipop farmer or fairy-tale witch took off to ply their weird trade elsewhere. This, it turns out, is because it was restored at some point for a film. You need to get further away from L.A. before you can be confident you're not looking at a movie prop (the Catalina bison come to mind) or at something built for tourists. The weathered caboose that stands across from the old train station in Rhyolite, for example, was actually stuck there as a gas station to service the tourists who came to look at a ghost town in the 20s and 30s.
Some of what was scavenged from Rhyolite was moved to Beatty, which is now a glum town of vacant lots and RV parks and signs from demolished motels standing forlornly by the highway. A solitary raven flaps off into the desert to find something cheerier, like a cactus patch or a horse carcass. A group of feral donkeys plods along an alley. Another group is casually slanting across the highway, on their way to stand around in a parking lot on a street corner, where they rendezvous with a man in a red pickup who seems to scatter some feed for them. The donkeys have a kind of calm fatalism you have to admire. They take no notice of the cars speeding along the highway. When one gets hit, it says, like Augustus, "have I played my part in the farce of life creditably enough?" and calmly expires. The main retail option in Beatty is a shiny Family Dollar discount store, where Jason and Jaclyn look for a colander; there are other stores, but they're mostly chained and padlocked from the outside.
Beatty probably has a lot of great qualities.
Some of the surrounding land is for sale, a great opportunity for anyone with a lot of broken RVs to park or an A-bomb to test. On the shoulder a desert nomad is walking, pulling a wire cart. He wears a hat made by cutting a round hole out of a square of cardboard. We passed him three times, altogether, and track his slow progress towards Shoshone. Nameless dirt roads stretch into the mountains, and you can see low white clusters of ruined buildings. The highway is empty and hypnotic and well-equipped with rumble strips.
In the park itself, we hike through canyons and badlands, hikes that are beautiful to do but boring to describe. Mummy Canyon, Room Canyon. We drove on into Badwater Basin, the lowest point in North America. First, grassy hummocks in a plain of salt-crusted dirt. In the distance, streaks of white and what looks like a ragged snow fence, which resolves into a straggling crowd of tourists walking out onto a plain of salt. It's like dirty snow near the road, then hard-packed, eroded ice, then finely-veined marble, then rough hexagons divided by low ridges. This is the busiest spot in the park, and is full of people taking silly pictures, but there's plenty of salt for all. On the other side of the road, a steep rise to sheer cliffs. Later, we drive to the lookout up here (Dante's Peak) and look down on what looks like a sea of milk and on tiny dots ("puny fools!") crawling out from the shore.
Even in midwinter cold snaps, the sun in Death Valley seems like a different, more oppressive sun than the one you get elsewhere. Every beam seems to smack you on the back of the head as it passes, and then to catch you again when it reflects off the salt. At the first chance afterwards, I bought a sun hat. I already owned a bucket hat, but I don't like to wear it, because it gives the totally false impression that I am a fun person. The sun hat isn't really better; it makes me look like I arrived on a cruise ship, somehow, even in inland deserts. Not sure what else to try, possibly a pith helmet.
I had two private goals in DV: to spend a night camping in the backcountry, and to not do any real planning. On New Year's Eve, then, I wandered out into the desert with my gear and a vague idea of hiking up into the foothills of the Greenwater Mountains. The day was windy and cold, but the next couple of days were predicted to be even worse. Also, spending NYE camped out in Death Valley sounds interesting, even if it's not; and I'd been determined to spend at least one night in the desert ever since I went to the hassle of checking my gear on the flight out.
Some areas are part of national parks because they're places of outstanding beauty or interest. The patch of desert near Shoshone is part of the National Park because it's on the same side of the road as places like that. The area itself is completely uninteresting. Hills and berms of gravel and loose dirt that give way to a flat plain that rises to become the Greenwater mountains. The foothills, as you approach them, become less and less attractive. The desert in front of you is the same as the desert around you, and when it rises up ahead, you can see there's nothing to hope for in terms of either shelter or interest. It's a disheartening little patch to hike in. After a few kilometres, I turned back, camped in the lee of a gravel hill, and spent 12 hours in a tent, reading and playing game after game of horrible chess on my phone. I turned the difficulty down from 4 ("distracted toddler") to 3 ("pigeon") and crushed the computer over and over, thinking every time, "ha, another victory for humanity".
As soon as it began to get light, I pulled everything down with numb fingers and plodded back to the park, where people seemed glad and vaguely surprised to see me, making my theory that the whole trip was a plot to abandon me in the desert suddenly untenable.
