Leaving Death Valley

 

Tuesday was our last morning in Death Valley. We awoke from the insistent cooing of mourning doves, just like the day before at Furnace Creek. From our vantage point at the picnic table we watched two of them slip into the tree under which we had erected our tent. Perched on a thick branch they proceeded to bill as if the world around them didn’t exist. How nice to watch this display of caresses that, eventually, led to their mating: another generation of Death Valley mourning doves was in the making.

We packed up and were on our way to Natural Bridge Canyon at 8:30, and since we were driving by on our way out of the park we stopped at Badwater. By now the signs along the park highway indicating that we were at sea level or hundred feet below sea level were nothing new anymore: we had passed them whenever we drove anywhere in the park in the last couple of days. Yet standing on the salt plain we had seen from Dante’s View the night before it was a strange feeling to know that we were now at the lowest point on this continent, 86m below sea level. Signs showed other points below sea level on different continents, some (in Africa, Asia and Russia and Argentina) considerably lower yet, but for North America this was it. Strange, too, the thought that Mt. Whitney, at 4,421m the highest mountain in the contiguous part of the US, was only 136 km to the north-northwest of here. We didn’t linger, however, since we wanted to get to Boulder City, close to the Hoover Dam, and after the great hikes we had done here this was only another stop along the way.

               

 We had planned our route so that we would bypass Las Vegas on the south, but our concept of this city we had never seen before, plus poor signage once traffic got busy proved to be somewhat confusing, and we ended up further towards L.A. than we had planned and had to backtrack a little. Henderson had been the other choice to spend the night, but when we got there we realized that things had changed little since Las Vegas: still huge hotels, casinos, malls, despite its proximity worlds removed from the peaceful setting we had just come from. Boulder City looked much more inviting, and we soon found a place to stay. Following the suggestion of a clerk at the grocery store we drove to Hemenway Park at the outskirts of town, right above Hoover Dam, a green space where the local herd of mountain sheep likes to graze. Alas, tonight of all nights they had chosen not to, so all we could do was read the signs talking about the sheep who have thrived in the surrounding hills.