DEATH VALLEY

Driving off the main roads and being ill prepared for such an adventure in Death Valley and you become a statistic, a dead one.  This landscape is as harsh and unforgiving as it is beautiful.

Pick your favorite pastel colors from a box of crayons, put them in a heated pan and as they melt and blend in strata you'll have a little idea of the carnival of colors that await you in the mountains of Death Valley.

  Ubehebe, a large volcanic crater located in the north half of the park.

Flowers at the lower elevations offer a visual tonic to the stark and arid.

I'll get around to identifying them...maybe.

Hairy Sand Verbina

Desert Marigold

Desert Star----found one name.

No matter how you cut the cards, this just ain't right.

Smack in the middle of Death Valley.

On our way out of the park we stopped by the lowest, 282 ft. below sea level, Badwater Basin.

Salt and rocks 

Rangers are a thing of the past. You slip cash or plastic into one the these "Ranger Robots" and it'll spit out a slip that entitles you to drive through the three and a third million acre park.....Camping costs extra. And when you get to your camping area you will be greated by another "Ranger Robot" dispensing only information on paying methods, not a lick about local flora or fauna.  So it goes.

Throughout the whole park we saw only one "working" real live ranger, and he, all of 18 years old, with a loose fitting Smokey the Bear straw hat and heat rumpled army greens, was issuing tickets to parked cars.... err, giving the car owners a second chance to buy a pass for entry to the park for those that "forgot" to pick one up on the way in.