We spent four days in the hottest place in the world: Death Valley. We explored the salt flats at Badwater Basin, the lowest point in North America, at 285 feet below sea level. When we pulled up, Little Kid looked outside and said “snow!” The salt really did look like snow!
We spent one day hiking through Mosaic Canyon, a beautiful canyon with marble sides. We had to do a little rock scrambling to get over some dry waterfalls. It would have been easy if the rock hadn’t been super slick. On the way back, we had lots of fun sliding down the rock slides.
We also hiked through Desolation Canyon, which was well named. The only land animal we saw was a spider. There weren’t many plants either. It was just a whole lot of nothing. The hike started out great, except for one part where we lost the trail and ended up climbing through rocky side canyons. Our hike took a strange turn when the trail ended on the road. We walked down the road, thinking that the trail would pick up again. But there was no trail, so we decided to just hike back to the car on the road. It was quite a long hike, and towards the end, Ma ran ahead to get the car. We were all very tired from our six mile hike.
One day, we took a break from hiking to go swimming in the swimming pool at a nearby hotel. Ma and Pa thought it was too cold to swim, but Little Kid and I had an awesome time.
Our last hike in Death Valley was Golden Canyon. It was a short hike, but pretty. I spent a lot of time exploring small side canyons and scrambling up onto ridges.
