Anywhere USA: Death Valley

Friday, April 1, 2016

Death Valley - Part 1

Hi all,
So we are all settled in at Beatty RV just outside the entrance to Death Valley National Park. Beatty RV is a small private rv park about 3 miles from Beatty, Nevada. It is nice but right along the highway so we do get road noise.
While we don't travel with a bucket list, we do say if we had one it would be national parks. We had not planned on this stop earlier but figured that we were so close why not?
After setting up we had time to check out the ghost town of Rhyolite and the Goldwell Open Air Museum.
Rhyolite was a boom town founded in1905 after the discovery of gold. It reached a peak of almost 10,000 in 1907. During the boom it boasted 3 story stone office buildings, an opera house, and even a stock exchange. It was touted as Chicago of the west. But alas it sadly only featured one mine and that unprofitable and closed in 1911. The town was doomed from then.

On the edge of town is The Bottle House created in1906 by Tom Kelly. Tom had built the house to raffle off and it is still in surprisingly good shape.

Just as you drive into Rhyolite you pass the Goldwell Open Air Museum. This is a private venture open to the public for free. This has some pretty eclectic art that really gets you thinking--??

miner and a penguin

depiction of The Last Supper

The Pink Lady

On to Death Valley- for those who haven't visited what do you think of if someone says Death Valley?(besides 20 mule teams n wagons.)
Wendy and I had visions of flat, sand, open hot land, actually a lot of nothing. How wrong we were.
A few facts on Death Valley N. P. is the largest national park in the contiguous states. It is 3.4 million acres stretching across Nevada and California. It has a high elevation of 11,049 feet and the lowest point in North America, Badwater Basin at 282 feet below sea level. The highest temp ever recorded in the world was at D.V. at 134 degrees!!
Weather here varies a lot, with the higher temps on the desert floor and 20 or more degrees cooler in the mountains. We hit it at a good time with some cool 60 degrees on day one and rising temps the next couple days. We did see 86 as a high while driving along.
We went crazy with the beauty here and took so many pics, I will shut up and just post for y'all.)