Death and the desert

Driving through the Mojave Desert is not quite what I expected. I've never been in a desert before so I thought it would be vast sand dunes with little or no vegetation but it's actually got plenty of small green bushes dotted off into the distance. Around here there's small abandoned shacks and decaying shells of cars a plenty. Further along the road all signs of life end and no town or village exists so having a full tank of petrol is essential. Saying that I thought you could really get stranded in a breakdown but there's plenty of cars going either way across the desert to flag down, it's not like the desolation shown in the movies.
Suddenly we spot sand dunes, a collection sit beside the road at the end of a dirt track. Now this looks like a desert. At the end of the dirt road you can walk to the top of the dunes, it doesn't look too far so we give it a go. It takes an hour to get there and it's tough going. The sun out here gets intense, when it's not obscured by cloud, and walking in the deep sand takes its toll. The dunes looked a lot closer than they were and are in fact huge. From the top looking out over the other side of a dune you can see for miles of which are mainly just sand dunes backed by mountains of which all is stunning. Mountains are also nearby to the dune I'm stood on and are the reason why the dunes are here in the first place. The wind blows around the mountains and deposits the sand along the plains below. The dunes also make an odd booming sound when the sands shift, like the noise of a nearby low-flying plane. This is due to the sand particles rubbing over each other when the wind shifts them, so the notice board at the car park tells me.
We drive through the rest of the desert thoroughly knackered and flying by the odd broken down settlement along the way. We head west again towards the truck stop town of Barstow and that's about all I have to say about the place.
Just outside of town is a ghost town, or so we hear. We got and have a look and thankfully it's just before closing so we don't have to pay the $6 each to get in. I'm even more thankful when we take a look around at American fakeness in full swing. This was once a ghost town but someone had clearly spotted a marketing opportunity here and decided to move in and sell guff to tourists. More impressive was the diagonal slabs of rock nearby the town in which old townsfolk had dug holes in looking for gold.
Heading east again and towards what could be the saving grace of America, the national parks. This one is the biggest, most unforgiving and surprisingly diverse parks in the land. It is none other than Death Valley. It's also California's last swan song for us before we finally leave this incredible state.
To say Death Valley National Park is big isn't even close. I thought Yosemite was huge but this place is just silly. 3000 square miles make up the area of this strange land that also hosts some of the hottest temperatures on Earth. This is in part due to it being home to the lowest point of North America at 282 feet below sea level. The highest temperature recorded here was 56 degrees Celsius! It's not as if this was recent either so don't even mention global warming as this happened in 1913.
The valley itself is very wide, I thought it would be steep and deep for some reason. Mountains surround the valley on both sides towering into clouds, it's as if the valley has it's own weather system.
There's plenty of hiking trails around the park and easy things to see near car parks. People are camping out here too but it gets too cold at night for my liking at this time of year.
We walk down Mosaic Canyon which has smoothed rock and mashed together rock creating a marble-type effect as well as a mosaic of colour, as the name suggests. Volcanic activity created most of the landscape around here and there's still large cone shaped mounds testify.
There's some crazy coloured rock around here showing all sorts of blues, greens, reds and yellows in lines of rock which you can drive between. At times I can't quite comprehend what my eyes are seeing. Some of it just seems fake . I never thought landscapes like this existed on this planet. It's a strange place and the colours contrast with the red rock and Mars-looking landscape around the valley.
That night we stay in a small town that has one bar open that is the only place to get food as well. We sit at the bar and get some beers and pizza whilst chatting to two Canadian bikers on tour. The bar is small and is half and half populated by tourists and locals. Adorning the walls are various parts of cars, the front grill from a Mercedes, the steering wheel from a new Mini, a Porsche racing team signed jersey and so on. This is because many car makers test vehicles to their limits in the desert heat of Death Valley. Clearly having only one bar to drink in the testers all come to drink in the same place. As Death Valley borders Nevada and we're over the state line there's a casino in town. There must be about 10 buildings and one of them is a casino. Good for us though as a local withered looking cowboy walks in and buys everyone at the bar a drink. Classic. He make look at deaths door and has probably spent more money than he's won in the casino but he's alright by me.
Another local tells us what it's like living here in Summer, telling us you can only go outside for 15 minutes at a time until you build up a resistance over a matter of weeks.
Back into Death Valley the next day we walk along another canyon and scramble between large rocks towards a vertical red rock face and amazing views back towards the valley. It's no wonder Star Wars films were shot here. There's also another ghost town near the entrance that thankfully this time is just that. It's still dull though apart from some odd and some plain crap art that's been dotted around the area.
Next up is a massive salt flat that is at the lowest point of North America and is a aptly named Badwater. The water that is here is extremely high in salt content and the area was named so by pioneers trying to make it through this unforgiving area. Death Valley got it's name from a group of American settlers trying to find their way through this baron land with diminishing supplies. The group couldn't find a way out of the valley for weeks and ended up eating their oxen and cutting up their wagons to burn so they could cook the meat. Only one of the group died and he was half dead when they entered the valley but that's where the name came from non the less.
Not far from Badwater is a large natural rock bridge formed over years by the whistling wind. We also have a look at the odd salt and dirt formations making up Devils Golf Course. Why is it that there's always something named after the Devil? Popular guy.
Death Valley is stunning and as the sun goes down crowds gather on a popular viewing spot to take snaps of the effects of sunset. It soon gets cold though. Cold or not the views are tremendous, this is why we came to America.
From the natural outer-space looking landscapes of Death Valley we drive into the night towards something equally other-worldly and odd, Las Vegas.