A hard place to love, Death Valley. An ugly place, bitter as alkali, and rough, harsh, unyielding as iron. Here they separate the desert rats from the mice, the hard-rock prospectors from the mere rock hounds.
Edward Abbey. The Journey Home.

There is nothing that my words can say about Death Valley that will even begin to communicate the beauty, isolation, spiritual significance, enormity, and power of this place of places. Situated in the shadow of the great Sierra Nevada mountains in central California and stretching East into Nevada, Death Valley and surrounding wilderness is an unforgiving desert of nearly three and a half million acres that welcomes the committed and wary traveller. This desert is not for spectators. It is by most accounts the hottest place on earth, as well as one of the driest. Its centre sits on the lowest point in the Western hemisphere. It is a curious landscape of salt flats, sand dunes, canyons, plateaus, soaring mountains and precious trickling streams. The distances and heights are agoraphobic and the temperature dementing.

The pioneers (including the famous 49ers) named many of the mountains and canyons appropriately: Starvation canyon, Skull rock, the Funeral mountains, Badwater, The Devil's golfcourse, Dante's view, Last Chance Range. The Timbisha Shoshone natives still live in the valley as natives have done for at least 12,000 years.

In Death Valley you can easily enter a true wilderness and venture to places where human contact is impossible. There is no phone contact; not even your best cell phone will work. There is no radio; you are too far from civilization for FM band and the AM band cannot make it over the Sierra Nevada mountains or the Amragosa Range. This is one of the beauties of Death Valley, but also a great deterrent for the passive tourist fatigued by a lifetime of associating touristic satisfaction with expense rather than effort.

This desert is a hard place to love. It's a land of snakes, lizards, cacti, arachnids, hungry coyotes, and constant danger from injury or dehydration. In many ways the desert is a place of death. You can see the struggle between life and death profiled in the ancient rocks which bear witness to a violent volcanic past and eons of climatic changes from desert to jungle and back to desert again.

But the desert is also full of life, although it is more humanly spaced out. It is a place where one's own life force can be amplified or even sensed for the first time in the desperate silence and the infinite distances that stretch across the harsh land to the promising horizon. These two features alone, silence and infinity, are a clear reflection of the soul of humankind which is spiritually infinite but ultimately alone. Every major religion of the world has made recourse to the desert as a crucial aspect of teachings on spiritual awakening. Going alone into the desert to achieve spiritual growth is still practiced by Shamanic cultures and is perhaps familiar to most people as part of the North American Indian vision quest.

My own expeditions or quests into the deserts of the world form part of my own inward journey. Death Valley lies along the nexus of my path.

There is little point in my providing a travelogue of my trips to Death Valley as they are as much about remaining still as moving through the landscape. In any case, the most important journeys have not been on roads and have taken me to places known only to the big horn sheep, the wild burro and maybe the mountain lion. There is of course much to do for the gawking tourist in Death Valley and thankfully these distractions keep 99% of travellers occupied and away from the sacred sites out of view of highways 190 and 178. As for what I have seen in ancient canyons and from the solace of my camp deep in the silent valleys I am sworn to secrecy with Mother Earth and a handful of other desert rats who crawl and scrape their ways around the American Southwest. We share a bond to the desert dust; doomed but exalted by our love for it. Even if I were to share the secrets they would be next to useless unless the heart could provide as much direction as the compass. There is much more to the desert than meets the eye.

In the preface to Desert Solitaire Edward Abbey wrote;

Do not jump into your automobile next June and head out to the canyon country hoping to see [the desert]. In the first place you cannot see anything from a car; you've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you'll see something, maybe. Probably not.

If you think I am crazy to venture as I do into the living heart of Death Valley on my own and for extended periods of time, you are right. Stay away; you have no business there. It's a place for fools, for mad men. It's dangerous. You might get hurt. Leave it to me and the other lunatics to roam its dunes and Joshua tree forests surrounded by cacti and Spanish bayonets on the lookout for the lethal and easily startled Mojave rattle snake (you think the Western Diamondback is nasty!). You would be crazy to go there. Nothing to see. Maybe some other time.

Bryan Roche is a member of the Death Valley Hikers Association