A Dark Narrow Canyon

Walk with me a while into the side of Death Valley.  Let us penetrate the silent depths of a barren mountain.  Each picture takes us deeper, darker.

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And finally we arrive where the body lay, taken long ago by tomb robbers.

Dante’s Inferno

Most of the forty-niners avoided this place, went another way to find gold.  But a few came to this spot and looked westward at this range of mountains from a basin that is now just west of Beatty, Nevada.  They figured it was just like the last twenty or so basins they had crossed, and would lead to another range of desert mountains, and this too would be followed by another basin.  So it had been these many weeks, and they were not good with maps to know exactly which range this was.

I drove up into these mountains as I had on each of the past three mornings, but today I did not coast down into the depths, but traversed along the range and viewed Death Valley from high above.  It must have shocked the forty-niners.  If they saw it in the morning, looking into the shadows, perhaps they recalled “the valley of the shadow of death” from the twenty-third psalm.  But they pressed doggedly onward to cross it, and those who survived called it Death Valley.

I stood at five-thousand feet on Dante’s view and looked westerly at Telescope Peak, eleven-thousand feet on the far side of the valley, zoomed in here at ten times.  On Sunday, I hope to stand on that summit after a three-thousand foot elevation climb on a seven-mile trail.

Not daring to look far below the rocky ledge I stand on, I can see Badwater and placed a circle on this picture at about the place where I stood yesterday. 

The old borax haul-road still twists through these hills as it did in the early 1900’s.  Here is a 20-mule-team rig as photographed by my uncle in 1938.  And here is my Toyota on the same road, the crunch of my tires on the gravel as Uncle Knowlton might have heard it. 

I wonder if he noticed the statue carved there above him, serene-looking, as if giving hope in this hostile place.

The shapes of these mountains are not like mirages on the desert—those shimmers of heat in the distance that appear as lakes or fountains to fool a thirsty traveler.  No, these forms are solid and close-at-hand.  They depict the inside of human brains, cerebral cortex which, if I stand here long enough, generates creatures from other worlds, or stately beings of this world, standing or sitting, watching or remembering or returning memory.


 

A spire stands over the valley of death, stoic and understanding, not caught up in the emotion of life’s end, having seen enough to cast it off with yesterday’s wind.

A trail leads north along the ridge from Dante’s View, where he never stood, but looked down upon an inferno that can’t be much different.

Those plants and animals who make it here take on a pragmatic view of life, having learned happiness in small pleasures.  They have given pleasure to this lone visitor, a satisfied knowing that I am not in control. 

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Badwater

Looking down on the lowest place in the western world is like seeing a frozen lake.  It lies flat in the bottom of Death Valley, shimmering in sunlight as shadows of the eastern range retract.  I go down near it in my car and park after the shadows expose its brilliance.  I walk out on salty rocks and earth to where there is no more earth.  From here on there is only salt.  The air is already over one hundred degrees and seems hotter in the white reflection of sun.  Salt crystals crunch under my boots.

I set up the tripod and begin recording me in this white expanse.  It’s hard to get a grip on how vast it is and how long it would take to walk across it, like those gold-rush travelers did and lost so many of their numbers and gave the place its name of death.

I kneel down to see the tiny growths of salt that rise up as from seed, and spread their tiny tendrils that I only saw later on close examination of my pictures.




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I walked a mile or two onto the salt flat of Badwater, looked back at the shore, took a long drink of water, and headed back to the real world.

Broadcast From a Quiet Planet

Rarely does rain get past the guardian mountains that flank the west side of Death Valley.  Each summer day, the forecast is the same—115 to 130 degrees and clear sky, about 90 degrees in the early morning.  I decided to see the foothills of a range on the east side by bicycle today.  A narrow one-way road twists up from below sea level on the valley floor, interestingly called Artist’s Drive.

But first, let me show you these pictures of footprints—mine—one at International Falls, Minnesota last February (left), and the other yesterday on the sand dunes (right).

And these pictures of the effect of wind on snow, also from last February in I-Falls (left), and wind on sand, taken yesterday (right).

I can imagine pictures of waves on the ocean or clouds in the sky, sand clouds as Lois P Jones calls the dunes.

I left the motel in darkness to park at Furnace Creek Ranch and begin pedaling before sunrise.  Ten miles of easy riding in the valley turned abruptly steep on Artist’s Drive.

I climbed a thousand feet among painted rocks, sculptured gullies, collaged ridges, and shapes not derived by any actions of nature as far as I could tell.  The Artist’s style has changed and developed in this studio for a long time.  Splashes of misplaced paint as in Susan Dobay’s studio, and chips of discarded rock in the gullies testify to a pattern in form and beauty, shapes rising above these discards—by design, by intuition, by mere bending to forces that call it to be?  Some would call it an arid and inhospitable mountain range, furrowed with dry channels, and since the borax has played out, having no value to humankind.  Those people are not artists.

By ten in the morning a fierce heat had already pressed its nearly intolerable burden on the quivering air.  I pushed upward into the fever of the day, and surprisingly within the heat, I remembered cold of International Falls.  Stopping often, finding no shade, and knowing the air had not neared its sweltering high for the day, consuming my two gallons of carried water at an alarming rate, it appeared clear that I could not do this all day.  I arrived back at Furnace Creek ready to sit in the café’s air conditioning.  But the café was closed.  I drove all the way back to Beatty and ate at the excellent Ensenada Grill.