Yesterday we spent the day seeing all there was to see in Death Valley. We started my backtracking 18 miles to a place called Dante’s view. This is the peak of a ridge that defines to the east, the formal Death Valley configuration. Looking down from this high spot, required us to walk up along, sloping hillside, culminating out of viewing area with all the normal models and placards showing us what we were looking at. The most notable thing you could see were the miles of white and pale blue distilled salts in the valley that were mostly composed of that age old mineral, borax. Most of us no borax as powerful cleaning powder in the household, but these days it’s most commercial use is in fertilizers and other industrial compounds. The borax mines in this area of California represent about 30% of the world supply of this critical mineral. I’ve read that there is enough borax here to last until 2040. That begs the question what exactly will the world be doing for borax after that date? It also makes me wonder what death Valley will look like once it is devoid of borax. He’s a reasonable questions that I’m sure some smart chemists are grappling with.
As we headed back towards Furnace Creek, we also stopped at Zabriskie Point. Zabriskie Point is famous for several reasons. First, there’s location and geology. It’s another dramatic overlook in Death Valley renowned for its otherworldly badlands landscape of golden, tan, and brown eroded mudstone hills. The formations date back around 5 million years and were created by ancient lake sediments that dried and eroded into surreal, wave-like ridges. From a naming standpoint, Zabriskie Point is
named after Christian Brevoort Zabriskie, a vice president of the Pacific Coast Borax Company, which was already mining borax in Death Valley in the late 1800s. It’s also one of the most photographed spots in the American Southwest, especially at sunrise and sunset when the golden light makes the badlands below seem to glow. It’s a must-visit stop in Death Valley, so once again we got off our bikes and trapped up 1000 feet to the Zabriskie Point overlook. In which pop culture, the spot gained significant cultural fame from Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 film Zabriskie Point, a counterculture art film that used the location as its central symbol of desolate, alienated America. The film, and its iconic Pink Floyd soundtrack, cemented the name in popular consciousness well beyond just nature enthusiasts. You really can’t drive past this viewpoint and not want to stop and see what it’s about. Let’s remember that Death Valley itself is famous as the hottest and driest place in North America, and Zabriskie Point offers one of the most accessible and visually striking vantage points in the park, just a short (steep and uphill) walk from the parking area. So, it sits at the intersection of natural wonder, geological history, and 1960s–70s counterculture iconography, which gives it a broader fame than most overlooks in the national park system.
The next planned stop was at a place called Artists Palette. It looked to be another very similar view spot of more or less the same death Valley view so when I couldn’t see a sign for it on the road and went beyond the 20 Mule Team Canyon sign, I decided to just head on past Furnace Creek towards our next destination. After another 20 or so miles, we came to the Mesquite Sand Dunes. These are classic sand dunes like you see in the movies and they’re specifically famous for being the spot where George Lucas while filming the first Star Wars movie shot the scenes of the planet Tatooine, another fun real-world connection here! Tatooine is the desert planet from the Star Wars universe, home to Luke Skywalker and Anakin Skywalker before him. It’s iconic for its twin suns, harsh desert landscape, moisture farmers, Jawas, Tusken Raiders, Mos Eisley Cantina, and the Hutt crime lords like Jabba. It appears in nearly every era of the Star Wars saga. The name and the planet weren’t entirely invented — George Lucas filmed significant portions of the original 1977 Star Wars in Tunisia, North Africa, using the actual desert landscape as the stand-in for Tatooine. Many of the sets still exist there today. Here’s the fascinating part: there is a real Tunisian town called Tataouine (sometimes spelled Tatouine), and it’s widely believed Lucas borrowed the name from it, or from the surrounding region. The Tataouine region of southern Tunisia has a stark, arid beauty that clearly inspired the look of the planet. But he also used these sand dunes in Death Valley. In later Star Wars films too, Death Valley was used again for Return of the Jedi (1983), particularly for the scenes around Jabba’s palace and the Sarlacc pit.
From there, we kept heading west to Panamint Springs, where we had a nice lunch sitting on a western porch looking out over the valley floor. After lunch, what was left for us to do was head south past Ridgecrest and eventually down into the Victorville basin. This ride is long straight, lonely, and devoid of almost anything interesting to see. It reminds us that there are large swaths of California where nature has just decided it will just ignore. There is more borax being mine here, but even that is less interesting than what we’ve already seen in Death Valley. The most interesting thing that happened to us on this stretch was that as we drove along at almost 90 miles an hour we suddenly heard something rumbling up behind us and then blasting past to our immediate right. About 50 feet off the deck was a fighter jet that decided it was going to buzz us, presumably for fun. I will admit to being pretty startled, but when the second one came by 15 minutes later I began to wonder whether Edwards Air Force Base was using this desolate stretch of highway to train pilots how to fly down close to the deck.
We ended our day at a Best Western motel in Hesperia, which happened to be right next to a Texas Roadhouse Grill, which provided us with a convenient spot for a nice western dinner to conclude our Death Valley adventure.
Today we will drive up to Lake Arrowhead and then down to the San Gorgonio Pass. That will take us on what is called the Rim of the World road, with breathtaking views in every direction. From there we will scale Mount San Jacinto, with its steep face and switch back turns, to have lunch in Idyllwild. That will more or less end our trip and we will slide through the familiar ranchlands of Valley Center with its various Indian reservations as we head home from our three day desert adventure.