Death Valley National Park

Death. Valley. What an incredible place. When someone asks me what is my favorite national park I visited so far, this is almost always my answer. I’ve never seen so much SPACE. It just looks and feels so empty, and that is amazing. It’s such an alien landscape, complete with a Martian mailbox! This is a landscape I never imagined could exist, I like to think of my ideal landscapes and conditions as Fire and Ice. And this was definitely the fire, with its deep red mountains, lava rocks, meteorite craters, salt flats, sand dunes, hidden waterfalls like a desert oasis. Need I go on? Ok, I will. The air force even uses this land for their training, which I captured some type of spy plane flying over head. And while driving my truck down an isolated, washed out road I heard rumbling like my window was down, only my window was up. I looked over and there was a jet fighter screaming about 100 feet off the deck running in parallel to me.

And the wind! Oh my, the wind. Camping was basically impossible here, the wind was playing my tent so hard the roof of my tent was just bouncing and flapping on top of me. I packed up at 12:30am and drove and hour and a half to a hotel on my way back to Vegas for the next day. Just to catch some sleep.

To make the experience that much more memorable, I was out in Death Valley right before the world shut down. I was out here for about 4 days, doin’ my desert rat thing, no cell service and not a care in the world. As I drove back towards Vegas, I got a text that work would be remote for the next two weeks. And then as the day went on in Vegas, shows and other activities kept getting shut down. Little did I know my last taste of freedom would have me at the craps table till 2:30am. Waking up on my flight home, we got a message all the hotels in Vegas were shutting down, and I flew back home to a world shut down by Covid. But at least I had plenty of photos to work on to fill the time :)