Jan 1, 2023
Written By: J.Couch
What a way to start the new year, with a trip to a National Park! I mean is it really that far off for The Wandering Couches to do something travel related for the first of the year? I think not.
However, our trip to Death Valley National Park was completely unplanned and unexpected. After arriving very early into Las Vegas, or for some there “very late”, we weren’t really sure what to do for the day. We arrived way too early for anything to be open yet and thought what can we do until about 10:00am when some of the vegan restaurants open for breakfast. After a quick Google map search, we saw that Death Valley was only about 2 hours away. We decided to set the map towards Death Valley, stopped at the store for a couple breakfast snacks and headed northwest. After a very rainy drive over some snow packed mountains on highway 160, a quick pass-through Pahrump, a turn at Death Valley Junction, we arrived at Death Valley National Park. When thinking of Death Valley, I have always thought of it as a vast desert with nothing in sight. I was very surprise to find that there are very spectacular mountains that surround this whole area. Hence the valley part, I guess.
Our rough plan was to come in through the south entrance and hit the Furnace Creek area, then look around from there, and wanted to end up near Stovepipe Wells. Once we made it into the park, we had to make a few stops here and there to take pictures of this beautiful area. I am sure that January is probably a much better time, temperature wise, to visit and explore this park. They say that the common temperature in the summer is a hundred plus and in 1913 it hit a world record of 134-degree Fahrenheit, 57 degrees Celsius. The hottest temperature ever recorded in the world. Not sure that I would like to visit at that time of the year.
We stopped at Furnace Creek Inn to check out the historic hotel and walk through the tunnel to the oasis gardens. It is a very pretty hotel, beautiful landscape and well worth the stop to check it out. They were very friendly and encouraged us to look around the grounds.
Just past the Inn is the Furnace Creek visitor center for a quick stop to get the passport stamp, which due to the last-minute adventure, again we didn’t bring our book. Also, a quick browse through the gift shop for Heather. Once we started looking at the park map, we decided to head south from there to check out the Badwater Basin, the lowest elevation in North America. Since we have been to some of the highest points the in the US, in Colorado, we needed to hit the lowest point, sitting 282 feet below sea level. Badwater Basin is located about 17 miles south of the visitor center in the valley. There are beautiful mountains on both sides, the west side was covered with a light dusting of snow and rain clouds blowing across their tops. It was an awesome site, again not something that you would see other times of the year.
We made it down to Badwater, found a spot to park and walked about half way down the trail out on the salt flats to see what the views were from there. If we had a little more time, we might have walked the half mile to a mile out to the end of the trail, but not sure what is out there to see. There were a lot more people out there that were a little more adventurous than us. We walked back to the car and headed back north towards the Death Valley Inn. On the way back we made a quick detour through the Artist’s Palette loop. It’s a 9-mile loop that takes you up near the east side mountains to see the different colors of rock formations that line the hillside. There were many different colors that you normally don’t see. It’s a one-way route that is an easy drive with a few pull outs to view the hills.
We were running out of sun light, which is the downfall to visiting in the winter time, and needed to head back to Vegas to check into the hotel for the night and find some dinner. See the Panchos blog to see where we ended up for that. It was a great trip out there and if you are ever in Vegas and not much into the gambling and drinking part of things and want to adventure, check out Death Valley National Park.
Thanks for wandering with us,
The Wandering Couchs
