Hot, Dry, and Low
The first spring after we moved to the southwest, we spent our wedding anniversary at Mesa Verde National Park. It was late May and we froze. The site was fascinating, but so cold and windy.
The second spring we spent our anniversary in a raging snowstorm at the Grand Canyon. Sideways sleet, obscuring fog, snow accumulations, the wrong clothing, it was quite an experience for May 22.
After that we declared we would only spend our next anniversary in the warmest, driest place we could think of that was within a two day drive. Two covid years put that on hold, but here we are now, two years later in the hottest, driest, lowest place in the western hemisphere: Death Valley.
It's nice here, 200 feet below sea level. We're staying at the Ranch at Death Valley. Our little patio has a view of shady lawn and humongous trees.
The ranch is a pleasant green oasis on Furnace Creek, a natural spring. It's not as rustic as we thought a ranch in the desert would be -- it's a kitschy resort with faux Victorian ice cream parlor, a general store "shoppe", a fake western themed dining pub, all arranged around a vaguely Arabic palm treed square.
There are horse riding stables, but they are closed now -- it's too hot for the horses to take trail rides. Our room - nothing fancy -- is in a complex that overlooks the golf course.
We have a quiet little patio shaded by palms. There is no sleet in the forecast and we are comfortable.
Since there are no trail rides for me, and Jim has long since stopped playing golf, we headed out to explore the desert.
The ranch was originally housing for the workers at the borax mine nearby. In the 1800s many made a hard living prospecting for gold and other minerals, and some few succeeded, but it was natural salt deposits that produced borates, and mining the salts was a huge operation. It was very profitable for a short time at the end of the 1800s -- "white gold".
Chinese workers shoveled the salt off the desert floor that was then carted up to stone lined boiling vats that leached the borax out. Here is what remains of the Harmony Borax Works.
Can you imagine boiling vast amounts of water out in the hot sun in the desert all day? They only worked in winter, summers were too hot, but it must have been brutal.
Then they had to cart the distillate out to the railhead 330 miles away. And yes, they used 20 mule team wagons. This is for my older readers who remember Death Valley Days on early tv, sponsored by Boraxo. Remember?
It was anything but romantic. It was harsh.
Death Valley gets on average 2 inches of rain a year and some years it gets none. None. There is water here, from springs and creeks that originate in the mountains years and years before the water trickles underground to reach the valley, but it almost never rains.
And yet, the surrounding mountains are beautiful in a stark and haunting way.
The borax mining operations eventually folded, and Furnace Creek redeveloped itself into a tourist spot. The ranch became a hotel complex. A mile up the road from the ranch is an inn where movie stars and the famous came to vacation and be seen in their heyday. The inn is elegant, a lovely example of 1930s luxury and leisure, with pool and gardens and shady tiled verandas.
We'll have our anniversary dinner there on Sunday night.
Death Valley is a place of extremes. It is the lowest spot in the western hemisphere, It is the driest and it holds the record for the hottest temperature ever recorded on earth (in 1913, although it is disputed due to the technology of the times. Still, it gets above 120 here in summer.)
And the Death Valley ranch and inn are extreme -- cool greenery, pools and a golf course, all surrounded by harsh desert and a history of brutal mining operations.
And the prices are extreme out here in the true middle of truly nowhere. Food prices are very high, and we paid $8.60 per gallon for gas.
But we are not freezing on our anniversary this year. It's good.
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