In California, the 2022-23 rains have reversed, temporarily, more than a decade of catastrophic drought. The result? A Superbloom: cascades of wildflowers across thousands of acres.
Some years ago, I succumbed to what Perkins called, not without irony, the “terrible fascination” of Death Valley. I was lured by the spooky clichés; I’d read “Helter Skelter,” which describes how the Manson family ran amok while hiding out at Barker Ranch, in the park’s southwest corner. After a few days in the region, I lost interest in all that. I realized that Death Valley is not so much a desert as a surreally varied mountain region with a desert at its heart.
We first drove down the Badwater Road, which winds along the foot of the Black Mountains. At Badwater Basin, we stopped to survey the terrain. Nestled in the rock face high above us was a sign reading “,” in white block lettering reminiscent of the Hollywood sign. “The actual bedrock is much lower,” Cowan told me. “It goes three or four kilometres beneath our feet. There’s layer upon layer of sediment on top.
The following day, we drove through Titus Canyon, one of the park’s glories. You approach from the Nevada side, over the Grapevine Mountains. You pass a ghost town called Leadfield, where an alleged hundred-million-dollar silver-lead mine created hysteria in the twenties. Then comes a two-thousand-foot descent down an increasingly narrow canyon, with tilting towers of rock on all sides.
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