Photos from 20 Mule Team Canyon, Death Valley

Published March 28, 2015 | By Elizabeth Weintraub

Zabriskie Point, Death Valley, California

The first and only time I visited Death Valley was in the mid-1980s for a Thanksgiving campfire dinner with my soon-to-be 3rd husband and a bunch of his weirdo alternative-religious zealots. These were guys who one day decided some other guy who once sat in the cubicle next to them was a guru, and they were all waiting for the spaceship to arrive, or something like that. Camping in the desert for Thanksgiving sounded like a normal activity to them, and I was hauled along.

My girlfriend Margie was horrified at the thought of me going to Death Valley with this troop of misfits. Sleeping on the ground was not a notion that either of us held as a romantic and fun time. I had never in my life gone hiking, either, I should mention. Hiking, as I came to discover, was a completely foreign concept. Margie decided that I needed to be prepared for anything horrible that could happen and somehow manage to survive. So, she gave me a going-away-present consisting of a bottle of blackberry brandy and a bottle of her prescription Xanax, best hangover medicine ever.

I recall, vaguely, roasting Cornish game hens over an open fire, so we must have plopped down in somewhere inside Death Valley National Park because the fire-ring was already there. The rest of the trip is a hazy memory except for the following morning when everybody jumped out of their tents and declared we were going for a walk.

WHAT! To WHERE? I moaned. There is nothing here except for flat sand for miles. A few rocks and dead bushes. Why would anybody walk anywhere? What? You want to crawl up those rocks? Whhhhhyyyyyy??? I grumbled and complained as I stumbled along in my flip-flops. We were hiking, I suppose, but I didn’t realize there was a name for this actual activity.

Fast forward to today when I’m hanging out the car window and snapping photos with my cellphone because I can’t wait to dig through the crap in the trunk to find my digital camera. Everywhere I look, magnificent rock creations jutting from the ground, displaying layers upon layers of sediment, clay, and various types of rocks, the remains of an ancient lakebed. My eyes pop in wonder.

Today we’re hiking at Badwater Basin. Yesterday, we cruised through the 20 Mule Team Canyon, which of course is reminiscent of the Borax commercials, although there seems to be a question about whether mule teams actually traversed that terrain. Below are a few more photos for your enjoyment. The quality tomorrow will improve when I upload photos from my digital camera; these were shot with my iPhone 6Plus: