Death Valley

I'm a little behind on posting photos from a couple of trips I have taken this year. I went to Death Valley National Park back in late March, got busy with some plumbing projects and fixing some other things around the house, and I never just never got around to posting anything here.

We flew to Las Vegas and drove the rest of the way to Death Valley. It was only a couple of hours away from Las Vegas. We stopped at a grocery store to get food for the week since food in the park is expensive. So is gasoline. It is definitely in your best interest to bring as much stuff with you or you'll be paying $3 for a bottle of coke and $4.25 a gallon for gas.

The scenery was desolate. It's an ancient, dry, desolate, and salty lake bed. Not much grows in the lower sections other than some scrubby bushes. The scenery in spots reminded me of what we saw in Petrified Forest National Park. There were striped buttes and hill sides with interesting colors from whatever minerals got deposited in the past. There were also a bunch of narrow canyons that have been cut through the eons by the spring rains.

We finished off our trip in Red Rock Canyon National Conservation area. It's mostly a desert mountain range with some interesting strata. I thought it was neat because there were some interesting plant combinations I wasn't expecting to see growing near each other, like a cactus growing near a pine tree.