Instead Death Valley was full of beautiful views, healthy living people and fiddles....
The weekend we visited happened to coincide with the annual "49er Days" celebration. The event involved a 20 mule team parade, the premiere of a new movie about the Borax company who employed the mule teams, and a fiddle contest bringing young and old (mostly prehistoric) together from around the country.
We pulled into the visitor's center knowing none of that. It wasn't until we crashed the unveiling of the hour long film that we started putting the pieces together. One of the pieces was that film was an hour long. We did not stay to verify.
During the gold rush of the 1800's there was a lesser known rush in the valley--a hunt for Borax, which at the time was indispensable and used for nearly every household/personal need. The owners of the Borax fields used mules to navigate the treacherous valley and safely deliver their product.
We got to hear detailed behind the scenes frustrations from the filmmaker about the Dial company, who now holds all rights to the Borax product line and refused to participate in the movie or the weekend's events. The rant reinforced our decision to not watch the movie in it's entirety. The caustically meandering introduction deepened our disappointment when we heard that the mule team parade had happened the day before our arrival.
We also heard all about Dial's Borax marketing campaign, which is either astoundingly ambitious and might involve stopping time or reanimation, or might be apathetic to nonexistent. "Every year that passes means more dead customers." Perhaps embalming could be part of its innumerable uses.
Better than the movie was the visitor's center, perhaps the best we have seen. We learned that Death Valley is the driest place in the U.S., has the lowest point of elevation in North America and is the hottest place on earth. We could testify to the valley being very dry and low but it was only 70 degrees. Since the record for the park and the world is 134 degrees, we picked a good time to visit (Libya had previously been thought to hold the record and was recently disavowed).
Wanting to explore we went to the parking lot to retrieve our van. It was then we heard fiddling. When we investigated the source we found not a RV and a driver with poor hearing, but a fiddle contest with a faulty GPS. We stayed to listen to some of the greatest fiddle playing we have ever heard. The youth competition had ended and so it was nothing but seasoned (pickled) and astounding fiddle playing.
Fearing we would not be able to see the rest of the park in the dark we left before finding out the winner and drove to Badwater Basin. The basin is officially North America's lowest point at 282 feet below sea level. We briefly got out, but as with high elevation we felt a little off kilter and left for higher ground. Upon which time we were nearly passed by a coyote. The coyote playfully approached our van, smiling. We didn't want to know the joke so we drove off. He looked hungry.
We finished our tour of the park and were back on the road just as the sun tucked behind the hills.
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