Death Valley - First Full Day

Our first night in Death Valley, we drove 20 miles southeast to Dante's Viewpoint to enjoy the sunset from over a mile high over the Valley. The bottom of the valley looks like a painting of random white smears.

Floor of Death Valley as viewed from Dante's Viewpoint, over 1 mile high.

Our first full day in Death Valley, we woke to a cold (42 degrees) but sunny morning. Our first experience was to visit the Harmony Borax Works where a Ranger gave a talk about the 20 mule team wagon trains that hauled the scraped borax to the Kelso Depot about 100 miles away – where we visited in the Mojave Desert. The site had a few remnants of the processing plant, employee company homes and a couple of the huge wagons and its water car. The trains averaged about 2 miles an hour up from the below sea level of the valley up through the pass, braking down the other side and through the desert. They hired Chinese to scrape the borax off the surface of the bottom of the valley and they were paid $1.58 per day, less their lodging and food. The borax operation only lasted about 5 years in Death Valley.

Two 

We then drove an hour north to the Ubehebe Crater – a fantastic steam-exploded volcano, exposing multicolored rock.

Next was the Mesquite sand dunes for a fabulous sunset.

We stayed near the dunes at Stovepipe Wells, again without electric. Jack's battery pack we bought easily handled his C-pap, but our batteries cannot handle running the propane fired furnace all night (needs electricity for the fan), so sleeping without heat, and running the furnace once in the morning to get temps up from low 40's to 70. Definitely not our preferred way to camp – we are “Glampers.”