The ULTIMATE 3 days in DEATH VALLEY National Park!

Death Valley is hands down one of the most diverse and unique national parks we've ever been to. After exploring a little bit of Nevada and driving on the gorgeous Titus Canyon Road, we've officially made it to Death Valley National Park for the very first time. Death Valley National Park is mostly located in California right by the Nevada border and it's known for being the hottest place on earth with a record high of 134 degrees Fahrenheit in 1913 as well as being the driest place in North America. It is the largest U.S. National Park outside of Alaska with over 3 million acres to explore and over the next three days we're going to try to see as much as we can and our first stop is the Ubehebe Crater. The Ubehebe Crater is a volcanic crater that's 500 feet deep and a half mile wide but it wasn't caused by your typical volcano eruption where it's lava spewing and flowing everywhere. This is caused by a Marr volcanic eruption which is when groundwater comes in contact with lava and the resulting steam causes a big explosion. This crater is huge and you can actually walk around the rim of it and there's even a smaller crater back there that you can walk to and you can even go down to the bottom of it but unfortunately since we got to the park a little later today and we have other things we want to do we're going to skip that this time but even just the views from the parking lot or just from going on part of the trail are just mind-blowing. The crater is a bit of a trek from some of the park's popular sites but it's close to Titus Canyon which is how we drove into the park so we now have a little over an hour drive to the Furnace Creek area which is the heart of the park and it's where the highest air temperature of 134 degrees was recorded making the name Furnace very very fitting and you may be wondering why is the park called Death Valley? Well a group of pioneers back in the winter of 1849 got lost here and although only one of them died they all thought they would eventually die here so when they got rescued one of them looked back and said bye Death Valley. We just passed a sign that said we're at elevation sea level we're going down so we're a little bit below but that is crazy. One important piece of history in the Furnace Creek area is borax. Borax has a variety of household and industrial applications like laundry detergent and household cleaners. Borax was first discovered in the Furnace Creek area in 1881 in a large-scale mining operation open known as Harmony Borax Works. When it was at full operation it employed 40 men who produced three tons of borax every day. It was tough to get this borax from Death Valley and the operation gained notoriety because of the 20 mule team which was a team of 20 mules that drove two large wooden cars filled with borax along the 165 mile 10-day route to the closest railroad in Mojave, California. The operation went out of business after only five years of production and on the short Harmony Borax Works trail you can see one of the original wagons. For sunset we've come to Badwater Basin which is one of the most iconic sites in all of Death Valley because it's the lowest point in North America at 282 feet below sea level. So it's a bit of a walk from the parking area to get to that iconic just wide open salt flat view that you see when you look at photos of Badwater Basin and the ground started out almost feeling like clay but starting to get crunchier as we go along. As we're walking out here I'm just thinking to myself this place is just so massive. I mean we're in the middle of this big basin here and everywhere you look every direction you can just see so far. There was once a large inland lake here known as Manly Lake which fun fact is named after me oddly enough. That's hilarious. I thought of that one a long time ago. But in all seriousness this lake had no outlet so salt and sediment accumulated here until the lake dried up long ago now leaving these concentrated salt deposits. These deposits form into interesting polygon shapes from groundwater rising up through the deposits and evaporating. The Badwater Basin is also super fascinating because if you look on the hill back here you can't see it from here but there's a sign on the hill indicating where sea level is which is 282 feet above but then if you look kind of where the sun is right there you're not going to be able to see it is Telescope Peak and that is the highest peak in the park at 11,049 feet which from where we're standing is over two miles above us and I read that this difference here is the most dramatic vertical relief in such a short distance in all of America. This was such a cool spot for sunset and it was really nice as the sun set quite a while ago but still so bright and just seeing the alpine glow on all the mountains is gorgeous but in all the photos I saw this looks white but it's actually kind of a brown color so if you come here expecting this like stark white I don't know if it's just the day we're here or what but it's definitely more brown just get your expectations in check before you come here. We made it to our free campsite for the night and while we're visiting the park we're staying at a place called The Pads which is outside of the park but still really close to it and has all of these concrete pads that you can park on it kind of looks like an abandoned RV park and no one really knows why it's here but it means you get a super level spot but for the rest of the night we're just gonna eat dinner and hit the hags we have another early and long day in the park tomorrow. This is so beautiful. We just watched sunrise at Zabriskie Point which is a very popular spot for sunrise but now we're gonna hike to Golden Canyon which is about six miles and you can start it right here from the point. This hike is really neat so far because you're walking between and on top of these badlands compared to Zabriskie Point which was packed at sunrise we have yet to see anyone that's ventured down the trail yet about two miles into the trail there's a turnoff to go to the Red Cathedral it's only about a mile round trip but we hear it's well worth the trip but we did read that there's a little bit of scrambling to get into it so we'll see if we can't get in there this was well worth the detour the scrambling was not hard at all it was actually really fun and you end up in this kind of like cove just surrounded by these super tall rocks they're not really red they're more of like an orange color tan orange but this is the coolest little nook we just made it to the Golden Canyon trailhead which is another place where you can start this hike but since we did sunrise at Zabriskie Point it made more sense to start the hike there plus they have a lot more parking it's 9 a.m on a Friday and the Golden Canyon parking lot is totally full we're now on this just dirt path kind of along the side of the road but i think we're going to pop back into the canyon and finish the last part of the hike one cool thing about death valley is that the first star wars movies star wars episode 4 was filmed here at various locations in the park and if i'm remembering correctly one of the scenes was filmed over in golden canyon where we just were the scene where the jawas capture r2d2 and they're carrying carrying him through a canyon just like this that's pretty cool to be able to be right in that spot oh my god i made it out of the canyon so the hike ended up being 7.4 miles and took us three hours and 15 minutes and towards the end we were so exhausted we worked up quite an appetite so we just made some quick sandwiches in the van it's the exact same sandwich we made two videos ago in our joshua tree video but we're basically just cooking and eating really quick things while we're here it's a pretty remote area there's not a ton of dining options so we're making sandwiches have a lot of snacks salads just things that are quick to put together so we have more time to explore next up we're heading to Dante's view which is a bit of a drive up into the mountains but it should have sweeping views of the park right down there is bad water basin which is 282 feet below sea level which is where we saw the sunset last night and Dante's view is a mile above that last night when we were standing down there it was crazy to see how tall the mountains were around us we're not even on the tallest mountain that's across the way telescope peak but we just are so high above it it is it's just this park is just full of crazy perspectives if you haven't picked up on it it is much colder up here down at the bottom i had just a t-shirt on and i'll have two jackets we read at the visitor center on the thermometer it says every thousand feet you go up it's get five degrees cooler so according to my calculations that's about 25 degrees and then with the wind also all right you guys gonna play golf going to the devil's golf course i'm so excited wait what okay it's not really a golf course and i knew that but it is really unique over 2 000 years ago there was a lake here that evaporated and it left behind a thousand foot layer of salt and minerals over the years water rises up through the salt bed and reshapes the formations as it evaporates what is left behind are tall stalagmites and spiky mounds that are difficult to walk on and it would especially not be fun to play golf out here in fact a 1934 national park service guidebook to death valley said only the devil could play on such rough links so you are able to walk out here but be very careful because these things are like razor sharp they kind of like coral reefs so we're trying to not touch them so we don't get cuts on ourself and apparently on a really hot day which is not today thankfully you can hear them make this popping sound as they expand and contract in the heat hole in one yeah for our final stop today we're going to drive the nine mile artist drive scenic loop and about halfway through that drive is a very popular spot called artist palette which is known for having these really colorful hills with these kind of pastel colors we'll explain why they have these colors in a bit we've also heard mixed things about this place we've heard that it doesn't look as vibrant in real life as it does in edited photos so we don't really know what to expect but we're excited to check it out for ourselves as we were driving in the mountains and hills definitely have some color but it's not super vibrant but as soon as we made it to the artist palette overlook the colors are immediately just more pastel and saturated it definitely looks like the photos to me the reason that these hills have all these colors is from different minerals in the volcanic deposits for example the red pink and yellows you see is from iron and we hear that the best time to see the colors is at blue or golden hour we're here about an hour before the official sunset time and in our polarized glasses the colors look really vibrant when we take them off or just in the camera it does not look as vibrant so we're hoping that as the sun goes down more the colors will get to pop more instead of having the sun glare on them i liked it because it reminded me of sherbert ice cream it's our final day here at death valley national park and we're starting our day with sunrise at the mesquite flat sand dunes the park has a bunch of dunes including the eureka dunes which are the tallest dunes in all of california but they are a bit of a trek to get to whereas the mesquite flat sand dunes although only a hundred feet tall or so are way more accessible walking on sand is obviously always a workout and we're trying to book it across a few of these dunes about a mile to get to the taller ones something about sand dunes just brings out the kid in me i just want to play with sand i just want to run around it's just so much fun and now to see how much sand i collected in my shoes oh wow next up we're hiking the mosaic canyon trail it's about 3.3 miles and according to the sign it's a visual and intellectual treat the reason that this hike is called mosaic canyon is because of its mosaic i'm not 100% sure how to say it but it's a scientific term for rock created by the natural cementing together of older smaller pieces of rock as we're walking through this canyon the rock walls basically just look like mosaic art it is definitely a treat like the sign said so we had heard that further down on the trail there's some scrambling and i believe we've made it to that part i don't think that's how you're supposed to do it but it worked these scrambles aren't very tall but the problem is some of them are pretty slick and there's not super good spots to put your feet in hand so you have to kind of just like go for it this is where the trail ends at this i don't know 25 foot 30 foot wall i don't think we're going up that one today i wouldn't recommend anybody else try it either we didn't totally know what to expect from this hike but it was way cooler and way more fun than we thought it would be but now it's time for the intellectual part of the hike figuring out how to get down some of those scrambles safely we're taking a quick lunch break we just whipped up some southwest salad from trader joe's which we've shared many times on the vlog it's our favorite we stocked up on a lot of them before we came out here and we're having a little kona playtime cuddle break kona and dogs in general just aren't allowed really anywhere in the national park which is why we came here a week earlier than planned it was so it would be cool enough that way we could leave her for a whatever this is in between all of our activities so we've had to go down a few dirt roads in the park to get some to some of the attractions but we have definitely saved the best for last this one is by far the roughest we just drove about an hour to our last stop in death valley national park darwin falls it's about a two mile hike to a waterfall that runs year round which driving down the road we just came down and then just thinking about death valley in general you would not think you would find any water here i said i wasn't going to believe there was a waterfall here until we saw it because it just seems it doesn't seem like there could be one we're starting to see a lot more water so it's looking promising there's a waterfall death valley is hands down one of the most diverse and unique national parks we've ever been to in just a few days we've seen a crater colorful hills canyons sand dunes been to the lowest point in north america drove up a mountain and now we've seen a waterfall even though it seems like we've so much in the last three days here in the park there's still so much more cool stuff to see but wow we are pooped we have filmed 11 out of the last 13 days which is not normal and it was not planned and we are just completely drained so we are going to take the next week or so off from filming so we can catch up on writing editing maybe sleep a little bit maybe relax a little bit and we're even going to take a little mini vacation two very kind subscribers adam and kim have an airbnb near big bear california and have generously given us a much-needed getaway which we are beyond excited about while we aren't filming a video there we will share some stories on instagram so make sure to follow along there to see what we get up to but after that we're heading back down to the california coast for another national park adventure i don't know what it is though but something about this place just gives me the yubi-hibis goodbye death valley hope you find your dad no hands the sand dancers yeah put one leg up and shake your body i'm not good at that one