Signs of life in Death Valley

Death Valley, according to the official pamphlet, is the hottest place on earth with the highest temperature recorded on July 10, 1913 at 134 degrees Fahrenheit.
It’s also the lowest place in North America at Badwater Basin, 282 feet below sea level, as well as the dryest, receiving an average of 2.15 inches annually. So, why were we touring a valley with such a life-affirming name?
It wasn’t on my bucket list. I’d voted for Yosemite National Park, but the closer we came to the mountains, the more obvious the snow.
We drove up to a crystal clear lake near Mammoth, California, but the road beyond was barricaded. So, we headed for Death Valley where we’d heard wildflowers were blooming.
Wildflowers weren’t blooming in the winter of 1849-1850, when a group of Utah pioneers headed for the California goldfields, planning to travel the Spanish Trail rather than attempting the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Captain Jefferson Hunt, who had traveled the Spanish Trail earlier, led the wagon train. They met up with another group captained by Orson K. Smith who had a map showing a route that would cut 500 miles off the journey. A number of the pioneers chose to go with Captain Smith, but when they encountered “Mount Misery,” a canyon nearly impassible for wagons, most turned back.
However, a few families, including Asabel Bennett, his wife, and children as well as William Lewis Manly, continued, soon getting lost in the Great Basin Desert. When they entered Death Valley, water and food grew scarce.
The 29-year-old Manly began scouting for a route that would take them out of the desert.
He was often gone for days with very few provisions. He wrote later in his autobiography, “I thought of the bounteous stock of bread and beans upon my father’s table, to say nothing about all the other good things, and here was I, the oldest son, away out in the center of the Great American Desert, with an empty stomach and a dry and parched throat, and clothes fast wearing out with constant wear.
“And perhaps I had not yet seen the worst of it. I might be forced to see men, the women and children choke and die, powerless to help them. It was a darker, gloomier day than I had ever known could be, and alone I wept aloud for I believed I could see the future, and the results were bitter to contemplate.”
In December 1949, the little group camped at a spring on Furnace Creek. The water tasted bitter, but the pioneers drank and gave thanks. They moved to another spring where they decided the families would remain while Manly and John Haney Rogers forged ahead, hopefully to find food and pack animals.
The two men summited the Panamint Mountains and two more mountain ranges, finally arriving at Rancho San Fernando, a trip of 250 miles, where they bought food, a mule, and three horses.
After a month, when they finally reunited with their party, one person had died, but the rest survived. The pioneers burned their wagons, killed most of the oxen for jerky, and took one ox to carry the children.
When the group climbed the Panamints, one of the survivors turned and said, “Goodbye, Death Valley,” the name the valley is now known by.
In our air-conditioned Toyota with a grocery bag full of snacks and brimming water bottles, we stopped, among other places, at Father Crowley Vista Point overlooking Rainbow Canyon.
Father John J. Crowley, the “Desert Padre, loved to stop and admire the canyon as he traveled the area ministering to his church members.
It was also nicknamed the Star Wars Canyon and is part of the large R-2508 Complex used by the military as airspace. The red, pink, and gray gorge was once a training ground for the U.S. AirForce and Navy fighter pilots during World War II.
The jets dipped as low as 200 feet while flying up to 300 miles per hour. The training stopped in 2019 after a F/A-18E Super Hornet crashed into the canyon, killing pilot Lieutenant Charles Z. Walker, a graduate of the TOPGUN school, and injuring several onlookers. Now, planes have to fly at least 1,000 feet “above the lip” of the chasm.
After we left Rainbow Canyon, swaths of gold, purple, and white flowers blanketed the desert. Profuse life burst from the seemingly dead land. The flowers included prickly poppies, desert golds, brown-eyed primroses, sand verbenas, various phacelias, and Mojave desert stars.
Even the brittlebrush was blooming. We were there at the right time, in the middle of March, to witness a rare superbloom with the last one occurring in 2016.
Two-and-a-half inches of rain between November and January, as well as mild temperatures, allowed dormant seeds to germinate. Under the right conditions, the flowers bloom rapidly and en masse, attracting large numbers of pollinators.
Perhaps that’s why I spotted three caterpillars humping across the now dry soil on their way to devour delectable greens, weave cocoons, and transform into moths or butterflies.
I was deeply touched by the paradox of flowers blossoming in such an extreme environment. I wondered about those lost pioneers. Did they blossom once they finally made it to California? For the rest of their lives, did they savor the sweet taste of clean water and the rich flavor of nourishing food? Did their eyes open to wonder of life itself, to the gold of a butterfly sitting on a wildflower, opening and closing its wings before flight? More importantly, do I?