There are two great valleys in Death Valley National Park--Death Valley and Panamint Valley. Both are otherworldly. With Death Valley, it is the heat, the texture, the lack of fauna (the desert of deserts), and a strange, heavy sodium light. With Panamint Valley it is simply the immense sense of isolation. Pretty much all tourism in the park ends at Stovepipe Wells. Anything west of that seems far too quiet to be in a national park. Other than the black asphalt, you clearly are in the wilds, Biblical-like wilds, not unlike where Jesus all alone met and overcame his temptation. There are no pullouts with explanatory signs, no roadside garbage cans, and oh so few cars. There is just you and the stone and the sand. A man could meet his mind here.
We begin the drop into the Panamint Valley. It is like a dream. A large, yellow gash runs north to south below us. It climbs quite a bit at the north end, where some large dunes pile up against a mountain where the valley abruptly ends. The mountains around us are black, so black that at first, I'd thought there'd been a fire. But no, it is just rock. It is odd enough I was temporarily fooled even though I grew up less than ten miles from a lava flow. Something is distinctly strange about them even for one familiar with the west. I'm coming to the conclusion that there is nothing familiar about Death Valley National Park. To enter it is to lose connection with your sense of the world even if you know deserts and the western United States well.
The Panamint Valley is 65 miles long and 10 miles wide. An alluvial fan sweeps across the valley and divides it into two basins, each with its own playa. As recently as 10,000 years ago, like Death Valley and Owens Valley, the long gash was filled with a lake, its highest shoreline 1,820 feet above sea level. The northern playa sits 1,540 feet above sea level, so during the lake's heyday, there was a good 280 feet of water where the highway now crosses that flat, yellowish-white plain.
I look for a designated pull-out. It is strange that before such an extraordinary sight and in a national park there should be none. Maybe we left the park, and I didn't see the sign. I cannot pass this and not at least attempt to capture some minute part of its beauty. The shoulder looks soft, but I'll risk it anyway. No cars, of course, are coming. We haven't seen one for over twenty minutes, coming in either direction, so I ease off the road onto a shoulder of gravel and sand a few feet elevated above the lakebed itself. I get out.
It's warm, pleasant, but not as warm as the sand dunes at Mesquite Flat were. This valley must be higher. It sure didn't look like it though dropping down into it.
I look both ways and cross the road. Such a Zen landscape. I take a picture of one white car before an incredibly flat yellow lakebed in front of a distant wall of stone.
If I were to die tomorrow, I would be glad I was here with Marci, and this--this would be one of my last scenes.
The silence is profound. I am glad to be here even though I'm not certain how many of those I have left. I guess none of us are. I'm just more aware of it than I ever was before. To be here is good. How seldom we fully appreciate that.
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