Jen, Stu and the boys, a year in the States 2013, 2014 6 months, 2015 4 months: Utah, Nevada, California and Nevada in a day...Death Valley National Park, California

March 2015
We had made plans to visit some friends in Laughlin, Nevada which is about a 90 minute drive south of Vegas. We had visited Vegas in 2013 for a Long Weekend and vowed and declared we would never go back....never say never is a lesson I am still learning! So we decided to leave the house in Enoch, Utah and drive to Vegas, spend a few days there, then head to Laughlin to see Marilyn and Rick. When we looked at a map, I saw Death Valley National Park looking pretty close to Vegas, and it was a place I had always been intrigued with. So the plan was to drive from Enoch, Utah, to Las Vegas Nevada, down into Death Valley NP, California, then back to Las Vegas, Nevada. Only about 11 hours of driving and we would get to tick a few states off. So we left early in the morning and travelled on the I 15S for about 4 hours....watching the sun come up...

and then watching the sun hit Vegas as we got closer...

We crossed into Nevada, then California....

driving on a long, quiet road and finally getting to...

Death Valley NP is in the U.S. states of California and Nevada located east of the Sierra Nevada, occupying an interface zone between the arid Great Basin and Mojave deserts in the United States. The park protects the northwest corner of the Mojave Desert and contains a diverse desert environment of salt flats, sand dunes, badlands, valleys, canyons, and mountains. It is the largest national park in the lower 48 states. Approximately 95% of the park is a designated wilderness area. It is the hottest and driest of the national parks in the United States. On July 10, 1913, a record 134 °F or 56.7 °C was recorded which is the highest temperature ever recorded in the world.
This place was truly amazing and like no other place we had been to. Vast, empty, diverse, hostile, welcoming, unwelcoming, spectacular........it was warm, but not too bad...and it was March, so I can only imagine what summer would be like here.

It was amazing to see an abundance of wildflowers.

There were salt-flats, badlands, mountains, snow, dust.....

I always had problems with high altitude, particularly in Colorado, where we sometimes got up to 14000 feet, so I had no problems with the altitude at Death Valley NP!

The area was once used for gold, silver and salt mining and there was a little bit of evidence from that on display.

The park is huge and unfortunately we didn't have the time to see it all, but what we did see was fantastic. There were so many different colours in the mountains and as the light changed they became even more spectacular.

We did a loop drive called Artist's Drive and Palette and it was stunning....

These colors are caused by the oxidation of different metals(red, pink and yellow is from iron salts , green is from decomposing tuff-derived mica, and manganese produces the purple).