Salt and Pupfish

This morning I woke up with a cold. I can’t quite understand how that happened.

We went out at 9:00am to the Salt Creek Interpretive Trail about half an hour up the road towards Stovepipe Wells. It’s a half mile loop on a boardwalk, around and across a salt water creek and marsh area. It is reached by another exciting mile of gravel road over which Hubby always enjoys driving the RV. The salt creek was not a knock out attraction, but it engaged the kids for an hour or so. Essentially it is the only habitat of a tiny brown endangered fish called the Pupfish, which breeds at this time of the year and then pretty much dies in the summer. Only the few that make it into the permanent pools survive. At the moment there is a lot of water, and the prickleweed is flourishing. We saw lots of fish and Deep Thought took lots of photos of them. I'm sure we'll post some of them in due course.

At the end of the boardwalk there is a trail heading over the salt flats. We walked out on that for about ten minutes before it became clear that we were going to be roasted. The salt radiates a bright glare equal to any snowdrift and it definitely felt hotter than it had on either of our morning walks in the past couple of days (despite there being a light wind today). We came back, admired the fish some more, then headed down the road to the Harmony Borax Works.

Apparently borax “harvesting” has historically been the most valuable kind of mining in Death Valley, far surpassing gold or silver. Thousands of Chinese workers were brought to Death Valley in the nineteenth century to work in the extractive industry. The Harmony Borax Works is one of the best preserved sites. It has the wagons from a Twenty Mule Train. In each of these trains, two large product wagons and a 1200 gallon water wagon were literally pulled by teams of twenty mules the 165 miles to Mojave. We looked out from the Harmony Borax Works over the white plain where the workers toiled to extract the mineral. It was hot, bleak and depressing. Imagine being the people who came here from San Francisco to do that work. It must have been grim.

This afternoon we are going back to the sand dunes at Stovepipe Wells because the kids fancy running barefoot on the sand (watch out for scorpions!) and tomorrow we head south out of Death Valley, to Calico Ghost Town.

In the absence of showers for four days, the family is becoming increasiyngly fragrant, and you should see Little Starlet's feet - !