a trip to death valley, part 4 - badwater basin

This post is part of a series. To read the first post, click here. To see more Death Valley photos, click here.

Our hike in Golden Canyon and Gower Gulch was finished, but we still weren't done with the day's explorations. A few miles down the road lay Badwater Basin, shimmering in the late afternoon sun, ready to receive new pilgrims. We stopped in the parking lot and took stock of the enormous expanse of salt that spread out below us. Here was the hottest section of the valley, white and flat, stretching on for miles. Five square miles, in fact. It's only one part of the greater salt pan, which covers two hundred square miles.

I was relieved to be done with the strenuous hiking portion of the day. My muscles pleasantly tired, I exited our vehicle and walked down to the spot where water pooled amid crusty soil. I looked up. High on the wall of rock above us was a sign: SEA LEVEL. We were standing near the lowest point in North America, 282 feet under the position of the ocean. It was restful to know we could drop no further.

Why is this point so low in elevation? The answer lies at the heart of Death Valley's origin story. Fault lines running north and south stretched the Earth's crust apart. On either side, mountains formed; I could see them now in front of me and behind me. As they moved upward, the space between them expanded and sank, and is still sinking. This valley was not formed by a river. It's the result of tectonic movement.

Death Valley is bounded by the Amargosa range to the east and the Panamint Range to the west. Here in the center, at the very bottom, is a unique environment, a place like no other I've ever seen. It is dazzling to the eye and bewildering to the brain, especially if you've just worn yourself out with the hottest hike you've ever taken, as I had.

Badwater Basin is an endorheic basin, meaning it has no external drainage. Water flows into it and doesn't flow out, so equilibrium is found through evaporation. There were once lakes here in Death Valley, made by ice sheets and wet cycles in the planet's climate. The last lake here disappeared two thousand years ago. As the lakes evaporated, they left behind minerals, most notably salt. The salt has been concentrated by heat and aridity, and augmented with sediment brought in by rain that evaporates quickly and leaves its residue behind.

Underneath this basin the ground constantly shifts and causes the salt to form plates in interesting shapes. The sediment left by rain further distorts these shapes. As I walked out onto the bright expanse, I found that what had appeared at a distance to be a uniform surface was actually a jumble of textures. There were areas of salt polygons lying flat, and other places where the salt plates jutted up on one side to make tiny mountains. Strange colors appeared here and there. Leaning in close to take pictures, I noticed greens, blues, and purples.

I sat down on the ground to steady my lens, and nearly swooned from the heat and light reflected up at me. I could barely see what I was capturing. Salt seemed to be everywhere: in the air, on my clothes, in my mouth. The whole world was salt. I picked up a chunk of it and felt my skin shrivel in response. The salt chunk was surprisingly hard, like sharp gravel. Here and there I found larger, harder pieces of salt in rock form. I put one of these in my pocket. I still have that piece. Whenever I hold it, I flash back to the sensation of standing on that desiccated plain, the taste of salt on my tongue.

Turning around to look back toward our vehicle, I saw a line of tourists walking in both directions, out onto the salt pan and back to the mountain. I felt again that I was on a pilgrimage, along with all the other humans here. We had come to show reverence to the forces that shaped this valley. They were beyond our comprehension, these forces. We could grasp them intellectually, measure their actions with scientific tools, but we couldn't hope to fully understand them. Certainly we could never control them. Left out here long enough, we fragile creatures would all perish and be absorbed by the endless salt. Death Valley doesn't care about us one way or the other.

But there is water here, and it does support life. The water comes from a spring to create a small pool that's far too saline for people or mules to drink – thus the name, Badwater Basin. It's home to plants, insects, and the extremely rare Badwater snail, which can only be found in a few pools in Death Valley. Sucked up from an underground aquifer by the faultline at the base of the mountains, this water began as Ice Age snow and rain hundreds of miles away. It's ancient water, polluted (from a human point of view) with ancient salt. There in the brine the weird little creatures eat and breed and do whatever it is they've done for however many years they've done it. 

To eke out one's daily existence as an implausible creature in a puddle of prehistoric water, on that desolate salt pan, seemed to me a most noble and lonely way of life. This idea kept popping into my head later at odd times, such as while I was brushing my teeth at night, or opening mail at the office, or freaking out over something unimportant. For weeks afterward, I'd catch myself thinking: the Badwater snails are still hanging out in that salty pool. The Badwater snails just saw another sunrise, another sunset. 

Even though I was surrounded by people, the eerieness of Badwater Basin made me feel like I was alone. The others I passed may have had the same feeling. They wore similar expressions of solemn consideration, mixed with discomfort from the heat and abrasive tang of the air. Sundari wandered far out onto the flats to commune with the spirit of the valley. Glimpsing her distant, hazy shape made me wish for a moment that I didn't have this obsession with taking pictures of everything, and could simply rest here for a while. Float about in that heat and flicker like a ghost.  

If we'd come later in the day, I probably could have done it – put the camera back in the RV and spent some time wandering. But it was too hot at that time of day to stay out on the salt for very long, and by the time I'd documented everything I found fascinating, I was so spent I could barely move. It's the photographer's curse, to always be busy taking pictures while important things are happening. And it's the photographer's blessing to be able to recreate the important things later, at her leisure.

I do like how certain segments of time get preserved that I would've lost otherwise, simply because I can point and shoot the camera even when my brain has given up for the day. Like this drive back to our campground, along a road lined with wildflowers. I see this photo and it all comes back: how tired I was, how the temperature was dropping. Anticipating dinner, darkness, stars, sleep. A sense of contentment arising when I saw the blue-gray shapes of the mountains.