Death Valley National Park Part 2

I am writing this entry on April 14. To update our current situation with the truck, we received a phone call from Pete's Auto Center on Wednesday evening telling us that the truck was ready. They had told me that they were hoping to be done on Friday or maybe Thursday. I love a business that under promises and over delivers. They sent a guy over to the park with the truck and had me drive it back to the shop. The truck is running like it was new. I did get a bit of a shock when they presented the bill because it was $300 more than the estimate, but they added a couple of things that were needed and I am fine with the $2100 final cost. That makes about $3100 that we have spent in Pahrump to fix the truck, trailer and replace one tire. We are now ready to roll. The only issue is that we have now paid for another week here at Pair A Dice SKP park, so we will stick around through the Easter weekend and head east the first part of next week.

In my last entry, I left us in a bad dust storm in Death Valley. The dust storm continued for 2 days. By the end of it, the campground was almost empty.

On March 31, the wind had reduced some, so we decided to head out on a driving tour of the park. We drove to the visitor center at Furnace Creek and checked out the exhibits. They were well done. We also watched a movie about the park. We were then prepared to take our driving tour.

We started with "Devil's Golf Course". This is a very interesting area along the floor of the valley. You can see the deposits of alkali on the rocks and dirt.

This area is very near to Badwater Basin, which is the lowest elevation in the US at 282 Feet below sea level.

We then went to the Natural Bridge Canyon. It was a short uphill walk through a canyon, but the formation made it worth it. We took a few pictures and walked back to the truck.

A Look Back Down the Valley to Badwater Basin From the Trail head

We then continued to Artists Palette drive. This is a one way, very curvy road that shows off some very interesting rock formations that have many different colors in them. There are a number of short walks to overlooks of the most colorful sections.

Very tight curvy road

We really enjoyed the drive, the pictures just don't do justice to the amazing colors.

On our way back to camp, we took a few evening shots of the sand dunes. The light and shadows do neat things to the dunes.

I will break up our visit to Death Valley NP into one more entry. I really wanted to take a ride up into one of the signature canyons in the park. I planned that ride for the next day. Come back to see how that turned out.