Page 8 February 10, 2022
Travel from front page
comes in well below that. It is (allegedly) the
hottest place on Earth—or at least it was on the
afternoon of July 10, 1913, when 134 degrees
Fahrenheit was (allegedly) recorded at Furnace
Creek. With ground temperatures that hit 200
degrees, the rain can evaporate as quickly as it
hits the ground. Not great for water-skiing, but
the perfect place to celebrate National Fry an
Egg on the Sidewalk Day (yes, there is such
a Thing, also known as Independence Day).
But in our humble opinion, the name given
to this geographical wonder by those exhausted
49ers might be a bad rap. No one in the troupe
who came up with the hyperbolic moniker
died of anything related to sun or heat. For the
obstinate travelers of the 19th century, in fact,
there were far more hazardous crossings. The
Great Salt Lake Basin, the Humboldt Sink, and
the Colorado River above the Grand Canyon
claimed the lives of hundreds of professional
soldiers and adventurers—much less crusty
muleskinners, wagon-trained families, or starryeyed
tourists in their station wagons. Of course
you could, and still can, die visiting places
like Death Valley, but these days, it requires
a thoroughly careless attitude to screw things
up that badly.
At times, it feels like the evolution of the
modern American Southwest was as much
an advertising campaign and a con game as
a historical imperative. Think of the Pasadena
Rose Parade and San Diego’s gorgeous Hotel
Coronado, both designed to peddle real estate
to newspaper readers and visitors from all over
the globe. Most people of an earlier generation
learned about Death Valley from the radio and
TV show “Death Valley Days”, that helped
launch Ronald Reagan’s political career and
offloaded metric tons of great-great-granny’s
favorite laundry soap, Twenty Mule Team
Borax, or its hand-scouring cousin, Boraxo.
The largest man-made structure in Death
Valley, Scotty’s Castle, still serves as an
appropriately picturesque monument to the
role of the con man—and maybe the selfless
benefactor—in the selling of the West. Walter
E. Scott spent a lifetime hawking shares in nonexistent
gold claims to gullible Easterners. In
1900, he quit Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show
and married a woman he nicknamed Jack.
Together, they bilked investors out of millions
(or maybe thousands, this being a tale of legendary
exaggeration). The shenanigans made
Scotty famous and brought him to the attention
of one of the nicest men in American history,
Albert Mussey Johnson of Oberlin, Ohio. Even
after Scotty’s schemes were exposed, Johnson
financed Scotty, Jack, and the kids, and even
included rooms for the aging swindler in his
construction of the Castle.
Yet for all the noisy human plunging through
the American Southwest into the modern age,
the most impressive and enduring feature of
Death Valley originated far earlier, when tectonic
forces shaped its quiet, eternal, and even serene
emptiness, especially at twilight and dawn.
For wannabe landscape photographers like us,
deserts provide the ultimate test of technical
and artistic skill. We can’t rely on the gaudy
architectural pretensions of Kings and Sultans
or the spiraling imaginations of city planners
in places like New York, Paris, or Istanbul.
The “perfect shot” doesn’t stare us in the face
like it does on a Swiss Alp or in a Norwegian
fjord, a quaint English village, or a Cairo souk.
In any vast, monotone space like Death Valley,
you have to go back to the fundamentals of
proportion and perspective, light and shadow,
time of day, of creating—or rather unleashing—
tension and momentum by the placement
of your subject in the frame. And this might all
sound like technical mumbo-jumbo, but spend
a few hours googling simple photographic
concepts—”Negative Space”, “Rule of Thirds”,
or “Magic Hour”, to name a few. Follow that
up with a sojourn in Death Valley, and the
artistry of your vacation slide show will earn
you the envy of all your neighbors.
Our vote for Ugliest (or most accurately
libeled) Place on Earth might well go to the
Badwater: Picnic spot in an inferno. Get there early to beat the crowds.
Dead Sea on the Israeli-Jordanian border. Over
millennia, the salts left by the evaporating water
have saturated the ancient landscape with a
hardscrabble, gray dreariness that resists the
most determined Photoshopper. Hardly what
you’d expect of an area the western world has
long called its Holy Land. In America’s Death
Valley, there are afternoons, particularly in the
summer, when the heat and glare burn much
of the landscape into a colorless nightmare for
the eyes. But “Dead” or “Death”? Not really.
Unless you do something really foolish, like
confusing an abandoned mine shaft with the
Mesquite Flats: Lost footsteps on a trek to the fabled Star Dune.
monkey bars of your childhood. Or forgetting to
notify the Park Ranger station when you wander
off to somewhere you probably don’t belong.
Or forgetting to check the weather forecast
before crawling into a flash flood canyon. Or
running out of gas and water because it was
too hot to get out of the car. Or…
Maybe those early settlers should have just
named the place Manly Valley. But if they had,
would we still be writing about it?
Next up: War and Peace in Jutland.
Ben & Glinda Shipley, published writers
and photographers, share their expertise and
experience of their many world travels. If
you have any questions or interest in a particular
subject, please email them at web@
heraldpublications.com. •
Artist’s Palette: Colorful dumplings left over from a catastrophic primordial stew.
Stovepipe Wells: Sensei and acolyte under the infinite evening sky.
Zabriskie Point at dawn.
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