Weekend Escape: Death Valley : People wilt in the hottest, lowest spot in the Western Hemisphere, but nature shows off

Because I love the smell of sun block in the morning.

Because it’s a dry heat .

Because thousands of French and German tourists can’t all be wrong.

I like these reasons, but the truth is my wife and I have not yet worked up a persuasive explanation for why we chose to spend our Labor Day weekend on the floor of the hottest canyon in North America.

The conventional wisdom on Death Valley is that one should visit in fall, winter or spring, when the weather is less life-threatening and one can comfortably camp, or splurge on a room in the handsome, well-appointed Furnace Creek Inn, which opens Oct. 19, closes in mid-May and charges $235 and up per night.

The canyon shimmered and baked as advertised, rustled with the sounds of strange little critters, and at sunset laid itself out like a purple pinup. By night, the sky lit up with the most silvery clouds I’ve ever seen. In short, the natural world did its bit, and we were pleased to be there for a tiny sliver of the valley’s most extraordinary season. But we had to rise above several aggravations, most of them man-made.

In this mission, we were joined by four friends, two air-conditioned cars and approximately 10 times our collective body weight in bottled water. The forecast was 118 degrees. The drive from Los Angeles was 5 1/2 hours. The most perversely optimistic among us, whom I will call Fellow Travelers One and Two, brought along a football, Frisbee, Whiffle ball and bat. The least optimistic, Fellow Traveler Three, posed this question:

“Why are we spending a weekend nine inches from the sun?”

Then we arrived to claim our three rooms at the Furnace Creek Ranch--the inn’s much more casual cousin--about 4 p.m. Saturday, and found the air-conditioning out. Also the ice machines, the lights and all else that was electric. The temperature: 115. Lightning had struck a utility facility, darkening a broad area from Shoshone to Stovepipe Wells, including the ranch’s 220 rooms, which rent for $98-$120 all year long.

We considered retreat--Las Vegas lay about 130 miles away--but we had less than half a tank of gas, and the Furnace Creek gas station, we were told, had been closed by the outage. So we were stuck.

Outside, around the faux Old West complex that makes up Furnace Creek Ranch, the Germans and the French skulked wordlessly in the shadows or lolled in the spring-fed pool. There were a pair of tour buses in the parking lot, and I’d guess more than 50 of the 220 rooms were occupied in the lodgings, which are run, as are all hotel rooms and restaurants in the park, by veteran concessionaire Fred Harvey. Across the highway, the cream-colored hills baked silently and ravens rested atop date palms and street signs, their black beaks oddly open.

“They’re panting,” park ranger Kevin Emmerich later explained. “They release their body heat like dogs.”

For a while we sat in the idle car, savoring its air-conditioning, then ventured out to find that the emergency buffet promised by the front desk had been closed down at 5:30 p.m. When we whimpered our complaints to a staff member, he offered this comforting reply: “That’s the front desk for you. They never tell anybody nothin’.”

Fortunately, Tino’s and the Wrangler Steakhouse, the two restaurants that normally serve the hotel, later were able to scrape three entrees together: spaghetti or chicken or steak. But first we sauntered off to wait in our dark rooms, knowing that only a mechanical breakthrough could save us from a Labor Day flambe .

“I hate Death Valley,” concluded Fellow Traveler Three.

*

Right around sunset on that Saturday night, just when things seemed likely to get desperate, our ceiling fan stirred. The air-conditioning began to rumble. Lights flickered on, and a general rejoicing went up. Merrily we slept. And the next morning, we set off to survey the valley.

We began with a futile search for desert pupfish (an inch-long creature that lives in saltwater) amid the eerily green pickle weed of Salt Creek. (The next day we did find a pair of pupfish--under glass at the National Park Service’s Furnace Creek Visitor Center.)

Scotty’s Castle, set in the hills 55 miles from Furnace Creek, was the farthest point on our itinerary. We arrived in time (10 a.m.) for the day’s first tour of the spacious two-story Spanish-style improvisation, and learned how it was built at great cost in the 1920s and 1930s by Chicago businessman Albert Johnson, but made famous by his friend Walter Scott, a fast-talker widely known as “Death Valley Scotty.”

On the way back from the castle, we stopped at the Sand Dunes. The fine, yellowish sand covers an estimated 25 square miles, crisscrossed by the tracks of tiny animals and, so my guidebook said, sidewinders. Happily, we found none of those, and no people, either: The only other car in the parking lot was leaving as we arrived. We watched the sun dance in and out of cloud cover, staging a subtle light show on the rippled dunes, and we got very warm very quickly; it was now about 110 degrees. Walking around in brilliant sun and immense dry heat had two principal effects on me: a headache, and the sensation that I had become a prop in a cruel science fair experiment.

Badwater, our first afternoon stop, is the lowest spot in the valley at about 280 feet below sea level, and exerts elemental authority. It’s usually the hottest spot in the park; it’s vast and flat and filmed with salt so thick that in spots, it looks like two inches of newly fallen snow.

Out we trooped across the white flatness, where for an hour we crouched and jumped and tossed and swung, employing football, Frisbee, Whiffle ball and bat in this incredible spare landscape.

The only thing left was to watch the sunset from Artists Palette, where minerals and time have turned the rocks ghostly hues of red, orange, yellow and green.

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Budget for Two

Gas from Los Angeles: $58.00

Furnace Creek Ranch, 2 nights: 186.93

Meals: 111.92

Groceries, snacks, water: 21.05

Entrance to Scotty’s Castle: 16.00

FINAL TAB: $393.90

Furnace Creek Inn & Ranch Resort, tel. (619) 786-2345. Death Valley National Park Visitor Center, tel. (619) 786-2331.