7am (ish) we entered the park and took our obligatory picture sign. There was literally NO ONE around at this time in the morning. The sun was so low the mountains in the background were blocking it.
Our first stop was a drive up to Dante's View. It was a drive way out of the way and we were worried if we'd have enough time because we had tickets to visit Scotty's Castle at 9am. This drive was WELL WORTH it because the view was spectacular. You literally could see the ENTIRE Death Valley park. Death Valley is essentially a huge bowl, much bigger than even Salt Lake City's bowl. And it's slopes are insanely sloped. All of the whitish color you see at the bottom is not water, but salt!
Here we are at Dante's View. This is one of my favorite pictures of our entire trip!
We made it to Scotty's Castle in time - this is about 9am. This castle is actually just a large mansion that was built in the 1920s. And it wasn't really owned by Scotty, it was owned by his close friends. They vacationed in Death Valley during the winter to get away from the cold of Chicago. Surprisingly, I would agree that Death Valley is a great place to visit in the winter for sure!
More info about this place here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotty's_Castle
This is inside the gated courtyard of the castle
They have live tour guides at the castle so they can call it "living history" and they even dress in period costume. Our guide was really good - she did a great job and answered a lot of our questions.
The main living area inside the castle. The cool thing about this place was that all of the furnishings and decor are original to the place and antique. Everything was nicely preserved throughout the years.
The kitchen - tons of Spanish tiles everywhere! They wanted the feeling of an authentic Spanish castle and they certainly did a good job of re-creating it!
On the balcony heading over to the other wing of the house. It was really bright outside!
The other wing contained the music room. Everything was extremely ornate and intricate. It reminded me of the English castles and cathedrals we visited in London.
Behind that screen is the massive pipe organ. It was AMAZING! It was a player organ that could play by itself and it was intensely LOUD. The tour guide wasn't sure which song would play when she pushed the button but I was enthralled when Bach's Toccata and Fugue started playing. It's THE most intense organ song you can listen to and to hear it live and right in your face was AWESOME! I stood right on the stairs as the song played. It was literally one of my favorite points of the entire trip!
Here is the song (you'll know it when you hear it) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkUUjUJ4wHg
That video is the best representation I could find of how the song actually heard in real life! Very powerful!
The big open pit below is actually the place where the pool was supposed to be. It was never finished. Can you imagine how big that pool would be?
There was a hill behind the house that we hiked up and was also the location of Scotty's grave.
This was the view from the top of the hill.
Our next stop after the castle was Uhebe crater. It's hard to tell in the picture but this was actually fairly massive. When we go back and visit we'd like to hike around this entire thing.
We headed next to a place called "The Racetrack" (I'll explain in a minute). On the way there we had to take a very very long dirt road (we mostly drove on dirt roads to get to the places we wanted to go in the park) and along the way we came across Teakettle Junction. Naturally, people leave their teakettles there :-)
This is The Racetrack. Essentially, it's just a very large dry lake bed. In the middle of the lake bed is that large black rock formation, they call that The Grandstand.
So, the Racetrack is named that way because the rocks essentially "race" along the bottom of the lake bed and leave their tracks behind. During the snow melt off the lake bed will pool a very shallow amount of water, just enough to make the lake bed slippery. When it's slippery and a heavy wind comes along (because it is in a valley) the rocks will essentially move incrementally because of the slipperyness of the lake bed and the force of the wind. They are heavy enough to leave tracks behind them!
We walked out into the very middle of the lake bed and snapped a ton of pictures as we looked for rocks with trails.
It's kind of sad because it's clear that people have been stealing rocks and just leaving their tracks behind :-(
...or they just steal one rock and replace it with another. This rock below is not the one that made that trail of course.
After the Racetrack we headed to a cool ghost town called Rhyolite. It wasn't technically within Death Valley National Park but it was close enough for us to drive to it. Keep in mind that everything we saw was very spread out and most of our time was spent driving to our next location.
Now we are in Rhyolite and this was bottle house. It was basically the only building that has been left substantially in tact. Someone still lives there. The other thing to know about Death Valley is that it was a mining mecca. We were told that there are over 10,000 mining holes within Death Valley alone. So, there were tons of ghost towns that sprang up during the different mining booms. Most of our adventures were spent looking for ghost towns and mine entrances.
This was the train depot of Rhyolite. The train never ended up being built here.
This was the entrance to the mine at Rhyolite. Of course, it was closed off so we couldn't go in very far!
No comments:
Post a Comment