We spent the last day of our photo safari visiting Death Valley National Park in California yesterday. This was not on the original itinerary but the lack of access at Bryce Canyon made a move after 2 days rather than 3 seem a good idea.
I didn’t know a lot about Death Valley National Park prior to the trip but was very pleasantly surprised. The park is vast and includes a huge diversity of sights including the enormous “Badwater Basin”. During the summer, I gather this is a dry salt flat but there had been quite a bit of rain recently (we got wet while shooting sunrise at Zabriskie Point) and the basin was actually a sizeable lake.
This shot shows the path out towards the salt flat from the official Badwater Basin viewpoint and boardwalk. The surface here has been flattened by all the tourists walking across it but on either side you will find strange, dried and cracked salt structures.
In addition to the basin and Zabriskie Point, we also visited 20 Mule Team Canyon, Dante’s View, Artist Drive and the Mesquite Dunes, photos of which I will no doubt post in the future.