Racetrack Playa

Racetrack Playa, Death Valley, California





















Badwater....gee, ya think?




Death Valley National Monument in California is a place most wouldn't consider as a vacation spot. Hell, most wouldn't consider it a fuelling up spot.....unless they knew what they were missing. Despite it's name, Death Valley is actually full of life, especially in the winter time. The "Thousand Year Flood" that occured over the Christmas Holiday of 2004-5 provided visitors to the park a once in a lifetime opportunity to see what no one alive has ever before seen. That week, over six inches of rain fell where often times NONE falls....for years. The ancient seafloor was swollen with lakes that appeared out of nowhere, and decades-old seeds were awakened to meet their destiny.
I am hoping that this year we see the same rainfall, despite the tragic deaths that occured during that miracle winter. I hope it pours again, so more Californians can set aside their predispositions and see something that may stay with them for the rest of their lives. I know a man who only visits places that his computer tells him are "suitable." Hundreds of unromantic, non-adventurous fools who rely on the opinions of others to shape their own experience. Death Valley in the winter is enough of an experience to change your life's perspectives for good.
Miracles happen in Death Valley. Science, with all it's explanations, has yet to explain what happens in the remote basin of Racetrack Playa. Stones found to appear out of virtually nowhere leave long "tracks" for hundreds of yards across the parched and cracked surface of the nacient seafloor. Is it wind, magnetic attraction, water, divine intervention, or a combination? Maybe neither, fact is nobody has the answer.
The Timbisha Shoshone band of Native Americans have lived in this area for centuries, scraping life from the rock and using every available resource to its maximum. Recording the hottest ground temperature in HISTORY, the Furnace Creek area of the valley posted a skin boiling 201 degrees in 1972. A golf course and resort actually reside in Furnace Creek today, due in large part to the Parks most affluent water source. Spilling thousands of gallons a minute from the parched Earth, Furnace Creek provides the life blood of the valley's life forms. From mountain lions to coyotes, gila monsters to road runners, tortoises to mustard flowers, the Monument is in fact a monument to life itself.
Spanning a country-gobbling three million acres, Death Valley National Monument also holds a few interesting (and more modern) bits of history. "Scotty's Castle" started as a retreat originally funded by Chicago millionaire Albert Massey Johnson. The world's greatest con-man, "Death Valley Scotty," was allowed to reside in the castle, operating the most elaborate swindle of investor cash ever seen in American history. ENRON had nothing on Scotty, hiring actors to play train robbers and even hostile Indians to scare off any potential visit by investors who wanted to see the mines they had spent their fortunes on. These mines never existed.
Thankfully, computers did not exist before the automobile, carriage, horse, or the ability of man to walk. If they had, the upright bipedal human would still be on the African continent reading about how Frank gave Eurasia a one star rating, and nobody should go check it out.


Cap'n Chris