Life in Death

I have a lot of catching up to do and I feel like Death Valley is a good place to start.

2 April 2012 - 5 April 2012

My and my love ventured into the magical desert, a place neither of us had spent quality time with. We drove through snowy mountains, keeping an eye out for firewood but the trees proved to be too damp.

We drove into the desert and stopped at what proved to be the last tree before entering the national forest. We chopped up the dead branches that had fallen to the arid earth and gathered it to the trunk of the car (Nat did the chopping, I did the gathering)

We were able to start a fire once we got to our campsite in the high desert (Wild Rose, which quickly became "Wild Bros" followed by a slew of jokes that are perhaps not as funny to anyone else as they were to us.) The campsite was on the side of a cliff and got quite cold at night. We spent evenings by the fire and mornings singing and playing music. The first day we visited dunes about an hour away.

There were chalk slabs in the miniature valleys of the dunes, we drew pictures on them and reverted to our childhood while families speaking all different languages laughed in the distance like a wide, spread out theme park.

We gathered green sand-spun glass and watched the sun go down behind the dunes, as it casted a movie-set glow on everything. The dunes looked fake in a beautiful way.

A little friend found solstice in the camouflage effect created while sitting on Nathan's leg. He watched the sun set with us.

After the second night in Wild Bros, we decided to venture down to the dunes again and stay at the campsite on the edge of them. It was hot, 95 degrees (a temperature we had not yet adapted to in the cool Sacramento spring) so we drank pale ale and sat in the shade of a small tree. Nathan played me songs as we slowly melted and the sun visited the depths of the dunes once more.

As the sky grew darker and our conversation delved deeper, the wind picked up the sand and it began flowing in a whirlwind around us. We had yet to set up our tent and wanted to do so before the sky went completely dark, so we proceeded in the storm, scrambling with everything half visible and adventure-like.

Back in civilization, Nat and I had purchased some chocolate crosses (such little effort for us to be blasphemous there) and kept them in the ice chest until we could take photos with them in the desert. It ended up being too hot and therefore the crosses melted as soon as we took them out of the package. We had to take impromptu photos instead the ones we had planned, so they turned out looking like we were eating something a lot less tasty than chocolate...

Goodbye, Death Valley.. thanks for being beautiful!

Back in the mountains, Nathan swerved off the road and what I instinctively thought was a cliff turned out to be a nice little road that lead down to a hazy, dreamlike place by a lake.