Exploring Death Valley, North America’s most misunderstood national park | The Independent

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California’s super-bloom draws influencers to Lake Elsinore

A super bloom of wild poppies blankets the hills of Walker Canyon on March 22, 2019 near Lake Elsinore, California. Heavier than normal winter rains in California have caused a super bloom of wildflowers in various locales of the state. The popular Lake Elsinore bloom is expected to decline in the coming days.

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California’s super-bloom draws influencers to Lake Elsinore

Cars pass a super bloom of wild poppies blanketing the hills on March 22, 2019 near Lake Elsinore, California. Heavier than normal winter rains in California have caused a super bloom of wildflowers in various locales of the state. The popular Lake Elsinore bloom is expected to decline in the coming days.

Getty Images

California’s super-bloom draws influencers to Lake Elsinore

A “super bloom” of wildflowers cover the hills surrounding Diamond Valley Lake near Hemet, California, March 24, 2019. – Over the last two weekends thousands of visitors have descended on the area about 90 miles southeast of Los Angeles to experience the unusual explosion of yellow, orange, white, purple and blue spring wildflowers causing traffic jams and overwhelming services.

AFP/Getty Images

California’s super-bloom draws influencers to Lake Elsinore

AFP/Getty Images

California’s super-bloom draws influencers to Lake Elsinore

A “super bloom” of California poppies and other wildflowers blankets the hills surrounding Diamond Valley Lake near Hemet, California, March 24, 2019. – Over the last two weekends thousands of visitors have descended on the area about 90 miles southeast of Los Angeles to experience the unusual explosion of yellow, orange, white, purple and blue spring wildflowers causing traffic jams and overwhelming services.

AFP/Getty Images

California’s super-bloom draws influencers to Lake Elsinore

A visitors takes a photo of a wildflower “super bloom” covering the hills surrounding Diamond Valley Lake near Hemet, California, March 24, 2019. – Over the last two weekends thousands of visitors have descended on the area about 90 miles southeast of Los Angeles to experience the unusual explosion of yellow, orange, white, purple and blue spring wildflowers causing traffic jams and overwhelming services.

AFP/Getty Images

California’s super-bloom draws influencers to Lake Elsinore

AFP/Getty Images

California’s super-bloom draws influencers to Lake Elsinore

Visitors take in the view of the “super bloom” of wildflowers covering the hills surrounding Diamond Valley Lake near Hemet, California, March 24, 2019. – Over the last two weekends thousands of visitors have descended on the area about 90 miles southeast of Los Angeles to experience the unusual explosion of yellow, orange, white, purple and blue spring wildflowers causing traffic jams and overwhelming services.

AFP/Getty Images

California’s super-bloom draws influencers to Lake Elsinore

Cars fill the parking lot at Diamond Valley Lake, one of the hotspots where visitors are flocking to see the “super bloom” of wildflowers, March 24, 2019 near Hemet, California. – Over the last two weekends thousands of visitors have descended on the area about 90 miles southeast of Los Angeles to experience the unusual explosion of yellow, orange, white, purple and blue spring wildflowers causing traffic jams and overwhelming services.

AFP/Getty Images

California’s super-bloom draws influencers to Lake Elsinore

Getty Images

California’s super-bloom draws influencers to Lake Elsinore

People pose for a picture among wildflowers in bloom Monday, March 18, 2019, in Lake Elsinore, Calif. About 150,000 people flocked over the weekend to see this year’s rain-fed flaming orange patches of poppies lighting up the hillsides near Lake Elsinore, a city of about 60,000 residents. The crowds became so bad Sunday that Lake Elsinore officials closed access to poppy-blanketed Walker Canyon. By Monday the #poppyshutdown announced by the city on Twitter was over and the road to the canyon was re-opened.

Increasingly, transatlantic travellers are looking beyond the more well established Grand Canyons and Yellowstones, in search of somewhere a little different. And few places are as wild – or satisfyingly surreal – as Death Valley. Tourism is in its infancy here and the timing is right for a visit, too. Last autumn it proudly celebrated 25 years as a national park and there’s more good news forthcoming. Bill Clinton signed the California Desert Protection Act on 31 October 1994, upgrading Death Valley from a national monument and adding 1.3 million acres to its expanse, and now President Trump is an unlikely cameo in the park’s current narrative. In a rare conservation success story under his administration, the US president has signed off legislation to further protect Death Valley’s wildlife habitats, swelling its borders by an additional 35,000 acres. This realisation further cements the park as the largest swathe of contiguous protected wilderness outside Alaska.

Death Valley (Visit California)

“If a desert is the land of extremes, then we’re the extreme of extremes,” says Renee Rusler, a 20-year park service veteran and my guide later that afternoon. Death Valley will never lose its ability to surprise us because, as she puts it, it can make visitors feel enchanted and anxious, excited and unsettled, all at the same time: “In moments it can instantly turn from wasteland to wonderland.”

I’ve come in early June, the mercury hovering around 44C, so we seek refuge in the air-con cool of my hire car and make for Badwater Basin, North America’s lowest point at 86m below sea level. Outside, the earth at the roadside is dust-dry, the shrubs bare-branched. The environment is so denuded I wonder if there is anything to see at all until we pass an 18-hole golf course and the Furnace Creek Stables offering carriage and trail rides. The sun is never on holiday here, so such sacred holiday rituals at least make some sense, and soon we’re passing road signs pointing to Golden Canyon and Artists Drive – spectacular, hulking gulches used as locations for Tatooine in Star Wars and Return of the Jedi.

Zabriskie Point (Visit California)

Not that you’d know it, but after walking across the seemingly-infinite salt pans of Badwater Basin, I’m told there is plenty of wildlife higher up among the park’s swathes of bristlecone pines. Desert-happy mountain lions, bobcats, coyotes and king snakes all seek shelter from the searing sun and yet these ghosts of Death Valley remain entirely elusive. Primarily because 90 per cent of the park’s momentous 3.4 million acres – an area bigger than Jamaica – remains true, inaccessible wilderness.

Tonight, I’m sleeping at the newly renovated £140m Inn at Death Valley, a desert Xanadu with a view looking right into the centre of the Milky Way. The Spanish mission-style hotel, with spring-fed pool and sugarcube-like casitas, is akin to an oasis on the moon, but with comfy bedrooms and a double hit of freezer-fresh air-con units and fans. There are even outdoor fireplaces for cold desert nights. But the magic of the place is not that it is here in the first place. It is the aura of golden-era movie nostalgia carried from front desk to saloon bar to restaurant. In its heyday, as grainy movie star pictures show, the resort attracted John Wayne, Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, James Cagney and Bette Davis. Jimmy Stewart and Marlon Brando stayed here, too.

Death Valley (Visit California)

When the sun appears next morning, the light reflecting the faraway escarpments in the woozy salt pans, I rise to hike to Dante’s View. Located on the north side of Coffin Peak (see also the ghoulishly named Last Chance Range, Deadman Pass and the Funeral Mountains), it reveals a hypnotically beautiful landscape of golden-lit basins, creeks and peaks and is so-named after Dante Alighieri, who described the nine circles of Hell in The Divine Comedy. I feel no morbid curiosity. Nor see a scruffy wasteland. All I see is summer loveliness.

This is what Death Valley is all about. Yes, it’s a kind of spiders-in-shoes sort of place. Yes, there are alarming signs designed to scare you (“Heat Warning! Don’t forget your water! Sunblock! Water! Hat! Water!” reads one such memorably excessive info board at the visitor centre). But even though a Death Valley visit can sound downright daunting, it’s a place of riotous and unequalled colour, a miraculous encounter between man, land, and time, and a ridiculously easy way to discover California at its most extreme. What better way to feel alive than that?

Travel essentials

Getting there

Virgin Atlantic flies to Las Vegas from London Heathrow and Manchester from £368 ($461). JetBlue, Spirit Airlines, Delta, United and Frontier Airlines serve Las Vegas from a number of US destinations.

Death Valley National Park is a 2hr 25min drive from Las Vegas.

Staying there

Doubles at The Inn at Death Valley from £319 ($417), B&B.

More information

visitcalifornia.com; nps.gov/deva