Day 2
(Afternoon)

It felt strange to be 282 feet below sea level.
This is the lowest point in North America

 

Pointing at the sign that says "SEA LEVEL"

 

The site itself consists of a small spring-fed pool of "bad water" next to the road; the accumulated salts of the surrounding basin make it undrinkable, thus giving it the name. The pool does have animal and plant life, including pickleweed, aquatic insects, and the Badwater snail.

Adjacent to the pool, where water is not always present at the surface, repeated freeze–thaw and evaporation cycles have gradually push the thin salt crust into hexagonal honeycomb shapes. You are allowed to walk out onto the salt flat about a mile on this path which has crushed the honeycomb shapes into a hard flat surface.

 

Our next stop was Natural Bridges Canyon.  About a one mile hike out and one mile back. But, this was late in the afternoon and the temperature had cooled.

 

Next was a short drive to Devil's Golf Course.  This is a large salt pan with a rough surface formed of large salt crystals. It was named after a line in a 1934 National Park Service guide book to Death Valley, which stated that "only the devil could play golf" on its surface.

A lake once covered the valley to a depth of 30 feet ; the salt in Devil's Golf Course consists of the minerals that were dissolved in the lake water and left behind as the lake evaporated. With an elevation several feet above the valley floor, the Devil's Golf Course remains dry, allowing weathering processes to sculpt the salt there into complicated forms. Through exploratory holes drilled, it was discovered that the salt and gravel beds of the Devil's Golf Course extend to a depth of more than 1,000 feet

 

Our last stop of the day was Artist's Palette which is on the face of the Black Mountains and is noted for having various colors of rock. These colors are caused by the oxidation of different metals (red, pink and yellow is from iron salts, green is from decomposing tuff-derived mica, and manganese produces the purple).