Monday, November 11, 2013 (Pahrump, NV)

Happy Veterans Day and a big thank you to all those who have served in our countries military branches.

The plan today was to take a tour of Death Valley. So after our workout and breakfast we headed out without Gracie. That is one thing traveling with a pet, when to take them or when to leave them at home. Since our truck break in experience this summer, we are not comfortable leaving Gracie in the truck and because Death Valley doesn’t allow pets on the trails, we decided to leave her home.

Death Valley has a lot more mountains surrounding it than we imagined and parts of it are so very desolate with no foliage of any type. It has it’s own unique beauty that’s for sure. These are the stops we made on our tour today:

Twenty Mule Team Canyon

20 Mule Canyon

I'm pointing to Desert Holly, it blends into the ground so you can hardly see it

The lack of vegetation was amazing, very desolate area

 Zabriskie Point

Views at Zabrinski Point

Furnance Creek Visitors Center (we didn't take any pictures there),
Harmony Borax Works

These were the two wagons and water wagon that a team of 18 mules and 2 horses would pull loaded with borax

Artists Palette Drive

You can start to see the colors in the middle hills

More colors starting to show

Amazing variety of colors in the soil

Natural Bridge

and Badwater, the lowest elevation in North America at 282 feet below sea level

Leaving Badwater these two coyotes crossed our path, we stopped the truck to take the picture and they didn't even run off, they didn't appear frightened of humans at all.

As it was, we wished we had brought Gracie so we wouldn’t have had to rush through the last part of our tour, oh well that’s hindsight. We had an amazing day seeing some amazing sights. It is amazing to me that our Creator God has the imagination to make so many different kinds of landscapes.

The one thing we forgot to take into account in planning our tour was that today was Veterans Day and the park probably had more people touring than a normal Monday, but even at that the park didn’t feel crowded. Nothing like the crowds we saw at Yellowstone National Park. One perk today was that it was a free park day, so there was no entrance fee into the park.

I would definitely go back to Death Valley, the one thing we didn’t get to see was Scotty’s castle which is in the northern part of the park – it was just too far and too much to try to cram into one short day. I guess that will be for next time.