In May 2019, while heading north to see our niece in Bellingham, WA, Cory and I made a detour to Death Valley National Park and Mount Whitney. Both Death Valley and Mount Whitney are off Highway 395 in Southern California. Southern California here is a bit of a misnomer, though. While technically it is in the southern part of the state, both are on the northern end of the Mojave Desert and both are roughly 3-4 hours north of Los Angeles.
Death Valley National Park is one of the hottest places on earth. Death Valley is at the northern edge of the Mojave Desert and it has the lowest elevation in North America. The average temperature in May is well over 105 degrees Fahrenheit. Thankfully, we arrived in Death Valley around 9 AM on an uncharacteristically cloudy day. The temperature for us was a comfortable 72 degrees or so. I will take it, I hate the heat and I thought Cory was crazy for wanting to go in the first place. For some reason there is a hotel/resort with a full golf course, in Death Valley. The amount of water they must pipe in to keep the golf course green, must be staggering. While in Death Valley we were looking for the ever elusive Road Runner, and yet again we failed in our pursuit. We did find some fairly sizable sand dunes, however. We would learn that these sand dunes and other areas of Death Valley were used in the film Star Wars, both for scenes with C3PO and R2D2 walking across the sands of Tatooine and for the first scenes featuring Jedi Master Obi Wan Kenobi, Alec Guinness.
Most interestingly however, is that from Death Valley, if you look west you can see the towering Sierra Nevada mountain range and, on a clear day, the peak of Mount Whitney. Mt. Whitney, at 14,505 feet, is the tallest mountain in the lower 48 United States. Mt. Whitney is perhaps best viewed early in the morning before some daily snow melt and vapor create clouds around its peak. The best place to see this is from Whitney Portal. Its pretty crazy when you think about it, at one point I am in the lowest elevation and hottest place in North America, and then a 1.5 hour drive, I am then as close as my car can get to the highest point in the coterminous United States. The temperature at Whitney Portal was a balmy 27 degrees Fahrenheit and the trails and parking lot covered in a blanket of snow. Mt. Whitney is covered in snow perpetually.
Before living in California, I would have never thought it possible, to go from an desert environment, below sea level and incredibly hot, to one of the tallest peaks in the world and temperatures below freezing point, all in a matter of a couple hours drive.
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