We drove out of Las Vegas, heading for Death Valley, Sequoia National Forest and an undetermined night halt.
Our first problem was finding the correct road into Death Valley. Our plan was to cross it East to West, but we carried out a large circle and ended up back at the Southern entrance.This wasted a couple of hours driving and added more miles to our journey through the Valley.
We drove into Death Valley (once the site of Borax mining and given to the National Parks department by the Borax company) and started to drive along the road which skirts the long dried lake (and we're talking THOUSANDS of years..)
The scenery is not what I expected. I'd done little research on the place, but somehow had a mental picture of those Westerns where the heroes (or baddies) ride past huge, standing sandstone pillars.
Death Valley by contrast is a fairly narrow (you can see from side to side - 10 miles maybe?) valley in which a river once ran. This river couldn't escape (because the lowest point of Death Valley, Badwater, is below sea level) and it formed a lake, which dried to salt flats as the temperatures rose.
There's not much to see in Death Valley. We stopped a couple of times along the road, to experience the stifling heat and to say we'd stood at the lowest point in the US, which Badwater, at 280 ft below sea level, is.
We then drove onto the Visitors centre, hoping to find somewhere to eat, as there were at most visitors' centres in the other parks. Unfortunately there wasn't (we should've stopped at the lodge a few miles earlier…), so we had a quick look around, watched the short film (which makes the most of Death Valley's few sights), topped up or water bottles from the cooled water fountain, ate our lunch (in 117F heat) and resumed our journey, now some hours behind schedule.
We continued through Death Valley, past the (surprisingly small) area of sand dunes and started to climb back out of the valley.
A short way up the climb out of the valley is a sign which reads "Avoid overheating - Turn off aircon now!" - Yeah, right! We thought. We've got a brand new Dodge Intrepid and it's 130+ outside…we're really going to turn off the air con…
But within 5 minutes that's exactly what we had to do! The temperature gauge climbed worryingly high and only switching off the aircon returned it to a reasonable level. Of course, this made it incredibly hot in the car, so we had phases of no air-con and a hot cabin and a hot engine and a cool cabin. The climb seemed to go on for hours as we rose from 300ft BELOW sea level to 5,000 or more above!
The scenery beyond Death Valley was impressively mountainous and it took many hours of driving on this road, before we reached another Interstate. However, our stay on that road was short lived as we took another mountain road through the Sequoia national Forest. Sequoia National park (http://www.nps.gov/seki/index.htm) is home to those huge Sequoia trees, some of which you can actually drive a car through a tunnel in! The trouble is that there are no roads across Sequoia, either East/West or South/North, so we were obliged to miss out a trip to the park and drive through the less impressive (in the sense of trees), but equally mountainous roads of the Forest.
Sadly the toll of the extreme heat of Death Valley, the dramatic variations in altitude and the tortuous twists of the roads, especially those in Sequoia, finally got too much for the kids and they were both unwell. Fortunately, they slept after that and when we finally reached the town of Delano (Where we stayed in a Comfort Inn), they felt well enough to wolf down KFC!