Weekend Trip to Death Valley National Park

| March 17th, 2010 | Travel, Travel Videos, USA

Two hours west of Las Vegas in Southern California lies a desert. Not only a desert, but the largest national park in the continental United States at  roughly 3.4 million acres. Death Valley National Park is one of the most overlooked National Parks due to would be visitors assuming that it’s just a massive landscape filled with nothing but sand and cactus. I mean really, who actually wants to visit a desert?

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Our flight lands in McCarran Airport – Las Vegas, NV at 9:00PM Thursday night. We check into our hotel on the strip and get to bed early in order to prepare for an early start Friday morning. 7AM comes fast, alarms are sounding off and reality sets in. We’re on our way to DEATH VALLEY.

Fast forward two hours, and we arrive at Death Valley Junction, located in Amargosa, California. Population: Fewer than 20. The roads seem like they’re starting to lose their curves, everything is coming to a point ahead of us. The land becomes more and more flat and the temperature is slowly rising. The breeze? Beautiful. We’re just east of the park, yet within just a few miles we’ll be at our first stop of the day. Zabriskie Point.

We pull into a small dusty lot on our left and all we can see from the car is the creamy colored jagged landscape ahead of us. We don’t really know what to expect. As we step out of the car, the excitement is boiling inside of us. The closer we get to the look out point, the less we speak to each other. We’re just trying to take it all in. Come to find out, Zabriskie Point was once a lake that dried up roughly 5 million years ago.

Twenty minutes passes and it feels like twenty seconds. We really want to do some hiking here, but this is just the beginning! We jump back in the car in awe and head off to our next stop. Badwater.

I’m at my lowest at this point. I mean, the lowest I’ve ever been in the U.S.A. Did you know that Death Valley is home to the lowest place in all of the North America? Badwater sits at 282 feet (86m) BELOW sea level!

The salt flats are as white as snow. Water fills some of the small craters on the flats and from afar the couple inches of water appears to be a giant lake in the middle of the salt flats. A mirage? Quite possibly! Check out the up close and from afar views below:

On our way up to the Furnace Creek Visitor center we stop off at the Natural Bridge. A short half mile hike from the parking lot brings you to a giant arch way that forms a natural bridge.

As we travel north from the Natural Bridge we stop off at Artist’s Drive”. This dry, windy road cuts deep into a canyon in the Black Mountains. The views are nice but not as impressive as some of the stops we’ve made thus far.

Twenty miles later after driving through twisty canyons and passing by hyper white salt flats we see some golden hills ahead. It almost seems as if after we turned that last corner these monstrous golden dunes just pop up out of nowhere. As we approach the Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes, we’re simply blown away.

My brother and I pack up all of my camera gear and head off into the dunes. The sun is high, not the most ideal time to be photographing this place but I’m working with what I’ve got.

We take a few seconds every now and then to hold our breath and listen to what complete silence actually sounds like. The desert is the definition of silence. Twenty quiet minutes pass as we sit atop the dunes and attempt to take in all the scenery that is offered from this vantage point. It’s almost impossible to take it all in though. My brother is feeling sick due to lack of water, and all of the hiking that we’ve done so far. We suck down our water as we watch my parents slowly making their way to the top of our dune, but they’re still about a quarter of a mile away. We can hear them in the distance and we casually make our way towards them.

We spent a good hour or two at the Mesquite Flat Dunes before heading to our final destination, Panamint Springs Resort. I have to be honest, we weren’t really sure what to expect when we showed up at Panamint Springs Resort. I had done some research prior to reserving our room here a few nights before. The result of my research wasn’t great. Tripadvisor displayed quite a few bad reviews. But, at this point I’m fairly numb to the reviews on TripAdvisor due to being pleasantly surprised at most of my hotels/hostels in the past compared to the reviews that I had read prior to staying there.

As we checked into our room we were all fearing the worst yet none of us wanted to say it to each other as if it would bring down the amazing day that we’ve spent together so far. We walk through the door and we see a room that is more than sufficient. It’s very clean, there’s plenty of beds, and it has that desert slash middle of nowhere vibe going on. There is no TV, there is no radio, but yet we’re totally content with that. We didn’t come to Death Valley to watch TV. We came here to see what this wonderful National Park has to offer and to purposely get away from the hoards of people that stroll up and down the Las Vegas strip.

After a long day of driving, hiking and sight seeing we consume an excellent dinner on the patio of PSR and head to bed early. I mean 8PM early!

The next morning we pack up the car and head out to two more spots before our trip back to Las Vegas. We drive out to Darwin Falls which is just down the road from Panamint Springs Resort. The gravel road the leads out to Darwin Falls is about 2 miles. Once we reach the man made parking area we hike through a canyon for about a half mile before reaching the falls. The falls weren’t as impressive as some photos that I had seen prior to visiting here. I expected them to be bigger, but I would still definitely recommend the hike out there. It’s pretty interesting to see a waterfall in the middle of a desert canyon.

On the road again, and we’re off to our final stop. We cruise along this seemingly deserted up-hill road that leads us to almost 5,000ft before we approach Father Crowley Vista. The views here are stunning to say the least. If you’re planning on staying at PSR, Father Crowley Vista is definitely worth the short trip west.

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All in all, our trip to Death Valley was nothing short of amazing. March is supposedly one of the best times to visit as the desert is very harsh in the summer and winter seasons. The temperatures were around 75-80F and the breeze was beautiful during our visit. We saw a quite a bit during our cruise through Death Valley, but there is so much more to see! Those sights will just have to wait until next time though. The next trip out to Death Valley will hopefully lead me some of the sights that I missed including; Dante’s View, Telescopic Peak,  Charcoal Kilns, Ubehebe Crater, Racetrack, and more.

I highly recommend you make the trip out here during your next visit to Las Vegas considering McCarran airport is the closest airport to the park. Not only that, but I cannot express enough how much Nevada and South Eastern California has to offer other than the Las Vegas glitz and glamour.

My advice is simple;  Be adventurous, get off the strip, and get out on the road!

See the entire photo gallery from my trip to Death Valley here: Death Valley NP Gallery

For more information on Death Valley please visit: Death Valley National Park

For more information on Panamint Springs Resort please visit: Panamint Springs Resort