Death Valley Day 1

Our first real day in Death Valley was a great one! Here is how our day progressed.

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.

 Scotty's headstone reads: "I got four things to live by: Don't say nothing that will hurt anybody. Don't give advice - nobody will take it anyway. Don't complain. Don't explain!" Sounds like a wise man to me! 

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!

Death Valley

Ramin and I got back from our Death Valley trip a few weeks ago. We went there in early March and it was a BLAST!  Who knew Death Valley could be so fun! I have a TON of pictures to post about Death Valley so instead of posting them all at once, I'm going to post them by days....sort of like how I posted our honeymoon pictures.

Here are the pictures from the day we drove down to Death Valley. We left at 8am Salt Lake time and we drove through Vegas and stopped at the Hoover Dam.  We didn't arrive to our hotel in Death Valley Junction until about 8pm.

Like I said, we stopped at the Hoover Dam and took a tour of the inside. We did the dual tour of not only the power plant but also further down within the damn.

Here is one of the four main power plant rooms. Each power plant room has 8-9 of these turbine things. They were HUGE. So amazing and electricity can be generated by water. These are also the original turbines made back in the 1930s.

During our "inside"  damn tour, we had to walk across this grating with a nice drop below it. There were a few people on the tour who were a bit afraid of stepping on the grating. Clearly, Ramin and I were not afraid - those are our feet below.

A few steps away from the grating was this porthold thing. We are literally right in the middle of the damn wall at this point. Pretty cool!

This picture gives you perspective of where we actually were. Just look at the middle of this wall somewhere and that's where we were.

Obviously we were really deep within the dam where we stood. Here is a picture of one of the staircases that lets you walk up or down the wall of the damn. This was our view looking up...it seemed like the stairs went on forever. And these are the original stairs from when the dam was built in the 1930s.

This was our downward view. This section of the stairs was made OSHA complaint and you can clearly see they look safer - although they still go on forever!

This is just one of two very large copper statues that greet you at the Hoover Dam. They've obviously turned green now, just like the Statue of Liberty. They were very art-deco. It's hard to tell their perspective but they were HUGE.

We took our obligatory shot of the national sign just as the sun was setting after our tour. We didn't get any pictures of the new bridge that was constructed over the dam although we did go and walk on it - very cool!

We finally arrived at our hotel, the Amargosa Opera House & Hotel, in Death Valley Junction. It was the fanciest place on Earth but it was one of the ONLY available places to stay and it had some history. It was kind of creepy to me and it was dingy, but it was kind of fun staying there.

Here's the shot of our room. We had two beds because it was the only room available. We only used one.

The bathroom. It all looked like original styling from the 1920s and it was very very old....at least we had running water, even if the pressure was extremely low :P

Probably one of the most unique features of the hotel was that there were murals and paintings everywhere. The owner of the place who acquired it in the 1960s painted everything in the 70s. This was right outside our room. What's up with the picture that wasn't finished?

This was the other side of the hallway.

January and February Updates

I've been bad about updating the blog the past 2 months and that's because it's basically been boring all around :) In a good way of course!

The latest excitement only recently happened the past two weeks where my mom went into the hospital for a hip replacement. Last weekend my Dad and I went to see Cinderella the ballet at Ballet West - it was FANTASTIC!

I've just got a hodge podge of pictures and videos from January and February so I'll just list them all out here.

One bit of news is that Ramin and I are travelling to Death Valley this coming week (Feb. 28 - Mar. 4). We are SUPER stoked because there is actually tons to do down there AND we will be staying in a "supposedly" haunted hotel...the show Ghost Hunters is even going to be filming at the hotel while we are staying there! How cool is that?!?! The show Ghost Adventures already filmed at the hotel and here's a recap video of their time there:  http://www.travelchannel.com/video/recap-amargosa-hotel Check it out!  It's funny because Ramin and I were kind of disappointed that the hotels we wanted to stay at were already booked up (last minute planning on our part) and he just happened to find this hotel outside of Death Valley in a place called Death Valley Junction and it only had 1 room left for the weekend!! He did some research on the place and actually thought I'd like it even better than the other hotels because of it's history. And of course I was excited to go...and then when he called the hotel to extend our reservation to Thursday night the manager told him that they'd be filming Ghost Hunters at the same time. It's funny because Ramin said she sounded hesitant when she told him the name of the show after he asked who would be filming (she had mentioned we couldn't enter taped off filming zones). After she said the name Ramin said "That's cool!" and then she sounded relieved. I'm sure she was worried we'd be creeped out and would want to cancel our reservation. Of course, we LOVE that type of stuff and so it's going to make this trip even more exciting for us. We can't wait!

On to the pictures and videos!

Random picture of Dingo chewing on a paper towel cardboard roll. He is so much like Lady sometimes - she LOVED these things!

Sunrise in January. Cold and smoggy, but beautiful. Our lovely inverted air makes for pretty skies!

A Sunday morning in January. Belle is literally curled up with Ramin, you can see his body outline in the blanket.

I have no clue what Dingo was doing here...but he was sitting next to me on the couch just staring forward...in a daze. What a weirdo!

 I got really sick at the end of January and our great friends Jenn and Matt brought dinner over for us one night. It was so nice of them!

In February I hosted a little mini project night with a few of my friends! We made felt heart mobiles. It was great sitting around chatting with the girls!  Angie and Gayle below.

Amy did not want her picture taken!

Ramin's parents sent us this lovely bouquet of roses for Valentine's Day. They were so pretty!

Last weekend for President's Day Ramin and I went up into the mountains to stay at Jenn and Matt's family cabin. It was SOOO nice outside up in the clean mountain air. The guys took little Liesel sledding down the hill and they all had fun.

Ramin with one of the icicles from the house!

 

Snow and ice hanging from the house!

The guys getting Liesel ready to sled down the hill!

Liesel even enjoyed holding an icicle!

Videos: Liesel going down the hill by herself!

Matt taking Liesel down the hill on his back

Matt and Ramin racing down the hill

This is my part of my Valentine's decor. I won this wood block set from The Wood Connection and I painted it, mod-podged it with paper and glittered it up. It turned out really cute!

We had some CRAZY fog throughout January and February - some of the worst I've seen in years. Here's one Sunday morning. You can't even see the gas station 200 yards away from our house!

And here we are to my mom's hip surgery. She won't like me posting these pictures but I think she'll appreciate them in the future for documentation of her experience ;)

Here she is right before going in for surgery.

The surgery went well, however, 2 days after it was done my mom's blood pressure dropped extremely low because she had lost too much blood...so she had to have a transfusion. Around 5am in the morning the start of her transfusion messed up somehow and it "infiltrated" meaning it started backing up and spilling out all over the place and it leaked into her arm everywhere! It was a bloody mess and my mom texted me at 6am that morning to come and help her. Here's what I found when I got to the hospital...it was all cleaned up...but blood bag kind of freaked me out.

She spent a few more days in the hospital but then moved to a rehab center so she could have physical therapy to help learn to walk using her new hip. She's making progress on that front but here's what I found last Monday night when I went to visit her....the "infiltration" bruise from the transfusion...

And the bruising on the other arm was caused by all of the needles she had going in...not fun!

My mom has a slight fever right now so I haven't been able to visit her for a few days - she doesn't want me getting sick before our trip to Death Valley...but she is OK.

A final picture of Belle and Dingo making out on my bed while I was laying right there...WEIRDOS!

When we have large meetings at work we rent out a theater close by...we had one of those meetings last week and I snapped a picture from my seat. We'll be moving into a brand new $50 million dollar building in the next month or so that has it's own theater so I'm excited for that! It's the building my Dad does security for over night!

And that's the end for now! My next picture dump will be pictures from our Death Valley trip!