I’m writing this about 6 weeks after it happened, which is about 6 weeks later than I’d like to have done it. Life, as it so frequently does, got in the way. Thankfully I can change the post date and we can all just pretend it was timely. Also I need this one done before I go to Glacier next month, and I don’t want to sell Death Valley short just because I didn’t get it all written down before the memories start to fade!

We flew from Cleveland to Las Vegas and rented a car to drive the 2 hours to Death Valley. Thankfully we had a direct flight, and even so it was still 4 hours in the air. There’s something magical, though, about flying over the whole of the midwest and watching the terrain change. You go from vast green-ness to patchy farmland which gets patchier as you get closer to the deserts of the southwest. I’m a huge map geek – I love a good map and what better map is there than an aerial view?? For that reason alone, flying is just magical to me. My favorite sight on this flight was a preview of a National Park not on this itinerary, but we could see the Grand Canyon out the window of the plane. It was distant but in my opinion VERY cool.

It doesn’t look like much from the air if you’re not paying attention or obsessed with how things look from the sky like me:

But if you zoom in you can actually see it.

It’s not an amazing picture, but I did take it with an iPhone through the window of a moving airplane at about 35,000 feet so in context it’s not that bad. You can actually see the road that goes from Flagstaff to the South Rim in the lower right part of the pic. Hello, Grand Canyon, I’ll be back later for a much more in-depth visit!

Right. OK. On to Death Valley.

As mentioned, it’s about a 2 hour drive from Las Vegas to Death Valley National Park. I grew up in New Mexico, so going back to the desert feels familiar to me, and the dry air feels like home. Sagebrush makes me smile. My husband grew up in Ohio, so for him it’s a little more like we imagine visiting Mars might be. Here’s a picture of the road, though to be honest it could be pretty much ANY road out there… but I promise it’s the one between Las Vegas and Death Valley.

We are definitely not in Ohio anymore. Look at all that… space.

The way the timing worked out, we knew we’d be getting to Death Valley right around sunset. Sunsets are right up there with maps as far as my favorite things to look at, and it turns out that one of the best spots in Death Valley for sunset-seeing is called Dante’s View, and it’s on the way into the park from Las Vegas. Actually Dante’s view is about 13 miles off the main road down a winding side road that takes you 5400 feet up the mountain. We arrived just as the sun was starting to set. Here are the views on the way up, and looking back the way we came:

But the real show-stopper is the view looking out over Badwater Basin. The elevation at Dante’s view is 5,476 feet above sea level. The elevation of Badwater Basin is 282 feet BELOW sea level – so you’re looking down just a little over a mile from the parking lot to the basin below.

I’m pretty sure this is where they shot the first view of Mos Eisley in Star Wars, and now I’ll need to re-watch that movie to see it with a new perspective.

The sunset that was about to happen did not disappoint.

I feel like I took a lot more pictures of this, but I also feel like pictures don’t really do it justice. Here are a few others:

And a panoramic video, because a still panorama doesn’t even come close.

There is a 3-hour time difference between home and here, and by this point we’d been traveling all day and then some and we were fading fast. Just like the light. Death Valley National Park is an International Dark Sky Association “gold tier” dark park… and when the sun goes down it gets dark FAST.

As you can see, even the headlights don’t do a whole lot against the looming darkness.

We stayed in the park, at the Ranch at Death Valley which is near the Furnace Creek visitor center. If you go, be aware that there is the Inn at Death Valley and the Ranch at Death Valley and while they are both part of the Oasis at Death Valley they are two very, very different lodging areas. In our tiredness we went to the wrong place first, and had a glorious (dark) adventure hauling our suitcases across the auxiliary (unpaved) parking lot and then up 3 flights of stairs because the elevator was broken, only to find ourselves at the check in desk we could have driven up to but still at the wrong location nevertheless. The right location was just a mile further up the road, but in the very very darkness and in our state of exhaustion it might as well have been in another county. We did make it, and it was a lovely spot which we completely failed to take any pictures of, which is a shame but I guess we’ll just do better when we go back next time.

We did haul ourselves back out into the darkness to view the night sky. We drove just a little way up the road, about a mile and a half to the road leading the Harmony Borax Works (it was on our list of maybes, and ended up being a great spot for stargazing), parked the car and stood awestruck staring at the sky.

This is a really terrible representation of what was actually out there. But this is what I captured with my regular old iPhone and a 10-second exposure. It looks better if you turn up the brightness on whatever device you’re using right now. Normally, in Ohio, when I can see Orion in the sky he’s just out there all alone. Here, it’s almost easy to miss him because he’s got so many starry friends.

I didn’t have a good camera for night shooting, and I definitely didn’t have the stamina to putz around and try new things with my existing camera, so I had to put Night Photography up there on the list of “Things I’ll do Differently When I Come Back.” And then we made our way back to the Ranch and collapsed into bed.

In the morning we planned to start at the Visitor Center at Furnace Creek, and then head out to Ubehebe crater before it got too hot – even though it’s a bit of a drive it seemed like a unique Death Valley experience and we wanted to go a little bit off the very beaten path before we hit up the known main attractions. All told, it felt like a successful few hours after a loooong day of travel. We were tired but pleased. Death Valley Day One is in the books.