At night heat pockets ripple the cool air the same way they do in a swimming pool. Our walk-in campsite at Furnace Creek (almost 200 feet below sea level) though cooled off nicely due to the low lying vegetation surrounding our tent. The late March day time temps almost reached a hundred with not one darn cloud in the sky. In summer this place sometimes goes weeks without dropping below a hundred.

You can feel the relief once the sun drops below the snowcapped mountains ringing the valley. Your skin breaths. In the campground people light fires despite the air temp still hovering in the mid-eighties. Birds and other animals begin to stir while the stars begin their show; hundreds of points alights against a milky white blur.

It’s all under attack. Light pollution from L.A. threatens the dark sky. Climate change is wrecking havoc on the park’s infrastructure as one in every five thousand year floods occur almost every year. Roads to popular attractions such as Scotty’s Castle have been closed for years. Even many of the 4×4 only/high clearance roads are inoperable leaving places like Darwin’s Falls accessible only by hiking a wrecked two mile road. Making things worse are the pointless cuts recently made by Trump, Vance and Musk. This cruel triad has slashed the budget for every National Park. At Death Valley it means six rangers lost their jobs for no damn good reason. There now are less campfire talks, less front country services and less resources for search and rescue (this in a park where every summer people die of heat stroke). People will die from their ignorance. Death Valley though will survive. Maybe not as it is. But it will far out last us.