An Exposure in Death Valley

Excerpts from story by Chris Welsch Minneapolis Star Tribune,

Death Valley National Park, sitting mostly on the west side of the border that divides Nevada and California, is less than five years old. It's the biggest national park in the lower 48--at 5,210 square miles, it's bigger than the state of Connecticut. It contains at least five mountain ranges (depending on how you count them), their corresponding valleys, an assortment of volcanic craters and five stretches of sand dunes.

Before its designation as a park, it was a national monument for a short span of human history, and before that, it was a wilderness that only a few American Indians, gold prospectors and borax miners ever saw, because it is not a friendly environment for human beings without internal combustion engines to carry them or air conditioners to cool them.

Last March, after four frenetic days in Las Vegas, I rented a car and set out into the desert. I intended to spend a day in Death Valley and then move on to some other parts of the California desert. But the park transfixed me; I ended up staying in Death valley three days, and I could have stayed another three if I'd had them to spend.

Death Valley is only about a three-hour drive from Vegas. I entered the park from Shoshone, at the southern end. I passed over the Black Mountains, and the first thing I saw in Death Valley itself was a vast field of desert gold--a kind of wild sunflower. At first I thought it was a field of bright yellow stones. I hadn't expected to see wildflowers in a place called Death.

I pulled off the road where several other cars had. The cool air bore the strong, sweet perfume of the flowers. The drivers and their passengers were wandering dumbfounded among the bright yellow blooms. It was prettier than Las Vegas had been, in the rearview mirror.

At the Furnace Creek Visitor Center, I joined 36 other people for a tour of Death Valley's flora, conducted by ranger Alan Van Valkenburg (Br 3). He led the group to a gravel stream bed. There was no water or soil in evidence, but flowers squeezed out of every barren crack.

A pale, slight man, Van Valkenburg wore his National Park Service uniform with military neatness. But his words were filled with unregimented awe for the plants that live in Death Valley. "You are so lucky to be here now," he said. "This is totally exceptional--something you'll probably never see again in your life. We had the right combination of rain, no winds to draw the water off, no cold snaps to kill things off. It was perfect. Now you have whole mountains of purple. Whole valleys turned yellow."

In the short time between the cool of winter and the blazing heat of summer, the desert blooms. In 1998, it bloomed in a profusion that hadn't been seen in more than 30 years. Van Valkenburg said that because of El Nino, 4.8 inches of rain had fallen since the previous summer; 1.8 inches is normal for an entire year.

Van Valkenburg profiled some of the flowers for us, ticking off names that sang; blazing star, brown-eyed primrose, evening snow, silky dahlia, gravel ghosts, indigo bush, Mojave aster. The pretty names adorn plants that cling to life fiercely.

"Everything in the desert sticks, stings or stinks," Van Valkenburg said. "And we're not just talking about the people here." The creosote bush emits a vile odor if an animal even breathes on it. Notch-leaf fusilia is worse: "It produces a sap that smells like the worst stinky armpit you ever encountered. And it doesn't just stink, it stings, like poison oak. It's telling something: 'Don't touch me!' "

But the plants' defense mechanisms aren't as important as a sense of timing. "Every flower we've seen on this walk lies as seeds on the ground until the right conditions come along." VanValkenburg said. "They have to be able to make it through the entire life cycle--if not, that seed is wasted." The plants in Death Valley produce seeds with a special coating on the surface that has to be washed off by successive rains or flash floods before germination can occur. In essence, the seed is its own alarm clock; it wakes up when enough water is present to support it. The plants burst into life for a few weeks before dropping seeds that might lie dormant for 10 or 20 years--until the conditions are just right once again.