Visiting the mother of all desert parks in North America during the extreme summer heat.
I kind of have a thing for extremes. For that reason, Death Valley always stirred my imagination when I was a kid and learning in grade school. It sounded vast and unimaginably desolate and a little eerie, too. One of the things I looked forward to most when I heard work would take me to Las Vegas was finally visiting Death Valley for myself.
First of all, what a name! “Death Valley” sounds kind of melodramatic, doesn’t it? Surely it can’t be that bad? The name came from 1849-ish California Gold Rush when impatient travelers on the road to California tried to take a short cut and ended up bewildered in the desert mountains. In later times, there was also a Japanese internment camp in the desert at Cow Creek. Mining companies harvested rich minerals from the land. Death Valley has seen a lot of American history despite being one of the most extremely inhospitable places in North America.
Speaking of hospitality, finding an affordable place to stay in Death Valley was a real challenge. I wanted to be in the park for sunrise, meaning I had to book a night somewhere near the park. Options were limited. The area between Las Vegas and the park is rural desert. I found a place called El Portal motel that had great reviews and decided to just go for it since the alternative would be driving round trip from Vegas in one day. No thank you!
I took off from work on Saturday afternoon, hopping straight into my car and flooring it into the desert. Once again, it amazed me how quickly urban Vegas gives way to the most barren of landscapes. It truly felt like an episode of Black Mirror as I passed the Area 51 Museum on the side of the road, looking deserted and run-down. I passed a prison and Creech Air Force Base. Continuing on, the mountains started to glow red in the sunset light and the posted speed limit slowed to 45 and 35 coming into Beatty, Nevada.
Beatty defines isolated and remote. It’s the offspring of another mining town, Rhyolite, that is now a ghost town but once held about 4,000 people. Will Beatty ever become a ghost town? It’s certainly seen better times. By the roads stood abandoned and burned-out trailers, the main form of housing. I didn’t want to think about the fragile life of the air conditioning systems in those trailers as they stood in the hot sun all day. However, Beatty does play an important role in the Air Force’s military space nearby and also as a gateway for tourists bound for Death Valley. There were no chain stores there like McDonald’s, but it did have several restaurants and diners.
It was time to see what $100 got you for lodging in Beatty. I pulled up to the spot my GPS indicated and got out of my car at El Portal motel. The first thing that rang in my ears was the quiet: at about 7 p.m. on a Saturday night, only the warm wind could be heard. Across the road stood a historic museum, closed for the night. There were no cars passing on the road. There were barely any cars in the parking lot. The yellow sign looked so classically roadside-motel-ish!
Bobby got me signed in at the front desk but soon found I was extremely distracted by everything else in the room, especially the rotary phone on the wall that was in mint working condition (I did my best to play with it without calling anyone or the police). She told me a little bit about the history of the town and the lay of the land. The black and white photographs on the walls told the story of this family hotel, which had been through several generations both of family and of buildings since at one time, the hotel had burned down. Bobby said if I had to feed the wild donkeys, to please feed them away from the hotel so they didn’t learn to constantly harass guests for food.
I checked into my room, finding it clean and comfortable. I was tired from a long day and was tempted to curl up, but had seen on the map of the area a ghost town only about four miles away. I hopped back into the car and took off for Rhyolite.
I got to Rhyolite in time to see twilight fall over the crumbling, abandoned buildings. Bobby had been right when she said it didn’t look like even fifty people could have lived there. And yet, the town had held thousands. The wind sounded like voices as it whirled down from the mountains around me. It was the only noise apart from a few critters in the bushes.
The next day, Sunday, I rose early and headed toward the park for sunrise.
Fun fact: I met no Americans in the park that day – everyone was a tourist from another country. We took in the park and felt the heat together.
By one o’clock, I was exhausted. But I had one more errand before heading back to Las Vegas: Amargosa Opera House and Hotel. This is was the alternative hotel I’d found to El Portal. In Death Valley Junction at the southeast corner of the park (Beatty is at the northeast corner), the Pacific Coast Borax Company built Spanish Colonial style Amargosa Hotel in 1923. In the 1960s an opera singer, Marta, and her husband suffered flat tires near Death Valley Junction. During the repair process, Marta wandered until she found the old hall and hotel. She seized the opportunity, made the hotel what it is today, painted the murals all over the walls, and established the place as a cultural center. She performed there and lived in Death Valley Junction until her recent death.
Maybe due to iffy reviews about wifi but more probably because of the savage, surreal heat, the Amargosa complex was completely deserted when I rolled up. I’d lost cell signal ages ago on the road leaving Death Valley, and it showed no signs of coming back even in the town limits. GPS showed me only gray area with few road options. I figured I should go inside the hotel and find someone to ask how to get back to Vegas. Feeling again like I was in some episode of Black Mirror or even Welcome to Nightvale episode, I wandered around the courtyard looking at this place: one of the strangest I’d been.
Inside the hotel, a tall blonde lady gave me great directions back to Las Vegas, assuring me that the road she waved at would take me to Pahrump and cell service. I was quickly on my way, but very impressed by this place and curious to read Marta’s book, To Dance on Sands.
I had a bloody toenail, sunburn, windburn, and was covered with sand by the end of the day. But the sublime landscape of Death Valley was worth it all. I felt sorry for the wagons that rolled through the land before there were roads, lucky to make it out in one piece. For the horses, panicked to feel such unusually hot earth beneath their hooves. For the pioneers suffering dehydration, imaginations playing tricks on them, feeling that this surreal place must be the very gate of Hell itself. The enterprising American spirit eventually found ways to make this land profitable, it’s true. But I love the purpose of the land as it is now, as a historic national park, in all its immensity.
Why go to a place of such extremes? My best answer isn’t in my own words, but a quote from one of my favorite authors, Alain de Botton: “Not everything that is more powerful to us must always be hateful to us. What defies our will can provoke anger and resentment, but it may also arouse awe and respect. … Sublime places repeat in grand terms a lesson that ordinary life typically introduces viciously: that the universe is mightier than we are, that we are frail and temporary and have no alternative but to accept limitations on our will. … This is the lesson written into the stones of the desert and the ice fields of the poles. So grandly is it written there that we may come away from such places not crushed but inspired by what lies beyond us, privileged to be subject to such majestic necessities.” (The Art of Travel)
May we always be inspired!
~ The Dauntless Princess ~