"But Lake Manly is no illusion. Instead, it’s more like a ghost from Death Valley’s prehistoric past..."

"... temporarily resurrected by the fast-changing, climate-churning present. Thanks to the record-setting rain that has washed over California during the last six months, Lake Manly — which dried up thousands of years ago — has reformed on the floor of Badwater Basin, the lowest point in North America. This unlikely and exceedingly rare comeback is a message from the warming climate, which baked the region in a years-long megadrought and has now flooded it with rain...."

From "California rains resurrect a long-dead lake in dry Death Valley" (WaPo).

Beautiful photographs at the link. But you're warned not to enjoy any of this. You can't abstract beauty out of its horrible context, the apocalypse we live in today. Experience it as "churning-churning." It's a "ghost" from the human-free past delivering a "message" that we're sinful and selfish... right when you're thinking of piling into the gas-powered F-150 and barreling across the continent to take a gander at this Lake Manly.

"[B]ut there is a ferocious headwind, like having a blow dryer in your face. Everyone runs on the white line, because the asphalt can melt your tennis shoes."

Said one runner, quoted in "'They’re a little crazy’: the ultramarathon runners crossing Death Valley – in a drought" (The Guardian). 

The race is 135-miles long, to be completed within 48 hours. Death Valley reached 130° on July 9th, but it wasn't quite that hot. It was 110 to 115°. 

And it's not like they're abandoned out there or forced to tote all their own water: "Each runner is trailed by their own support crew in an air-conditioned minivan, which leap-frogs their progress, stopping every few miles to provide them gushes of water from spray bottles, electrolytes, ice cubes, snacks and extra changes of shoes."

Kind of cushy, almost, no? Whatever. Personally, I love Death Valley. Haven't been out there in 4 years. It's a rough landscape!

 

That's my photo of the part of Death Valley called the "Devil's Golf Course." It's not all that rugged, and anyway, the ultramarathoners are running on the paved road. That's where the relatively cool painted white lines are.

When the pro-travel pitch feels like an argument against travel.

Look at the photograph the NYT travel magazine highlights from a set of "The 10 Most Idyllic Destinations" that it has featured over the course of an entire year.



Yes, I'd find that pretty if I drove my car out into the Wisconsin countryside and got back home the same day, but imagine going all the way to Albania and finding your way out to a farm just to look at that! Is that some kind of joke?!

Looking at some of the other 10, I'm thinking: Imagine going all the way to Morocco and getting a view that's like a toned downed version of Zabriskie Point in Death Valley. Why would you do that?!

Is it the mental experience of beating yourself inside the head with I am in Albania! or I am in Morocco! Morocco, I tell you!!? Do you go alone or do you drag along a companion whose inside-of-the-head you hallucinate as We came all the way to Albania/Morocco for this? We could have visited the wineries of Wisconsin or gone back to Zabriskie Point?

"Idyllic" means "Forming a suitable theme for an idyll; full of natural simple charm or picturesqueness. Also used trivially" (OED). Also used trivially — ha ha. I love that.

What, exactly, is an "idyll"? It's a poem (or poetic prose) describing "some picturesque scene or incident, chiefly in rustic life" or "An episode or a series of events or circumstances of pastoral or rural simplicity, and suitable for an idyll."

1873 J. A. Symonds Stud. Greek Poets x. 306 The name of the Idyll sufficiently explains its nature. It is a little picture. Rustic or town life, legends of the gods, and passages of personal experience....

The literal etymology is, indeed, "little picture."

Is any place really idyllic in itself, such that you can go there and experience the idyllic, or is the processing through the human mind what is necessary? The original meaning of "idyll" is a piece of writing. It's not the place itself but the poet's description.

So is it not more idyllic to read the poet's idylls? If you go to the place that might have inspired the poet to write an idyll, you'll have to perform the mental magic yourself. Maybe you should. Maybe that will expand your mental powers. But if you don't find the idyllic when you take a day trip to the countryside near your home, is it at all likely that you'll have the mental wherewithal to perform that brain labor after 15 hours of air travel and finding your way to a farm near Tirana?

"Once you've gazed upon and contemplated 150 million years of mostly Mesozoic-aged sedimentation, uplift, and subsequent erosion, it's hard to take seriously the self-important emotional expressions on the faces of Jake Tapper and guests."

Says Meade, commenting on my post "I think I've been cured of my interest in watching the Sunday morning talk shows/Was it just that after skipping them for 3 weeks — when I was off on a road trip — I'd lost the momentum of routine...."

You try it. Gaze. Stare into the face...

At the Life-Goes-On Café...

... keep the conversation going.

The photo is just before dark at Zabriskie Point in Death Valley on March 6th.

And, remember to consider shopping at Amazon through The Althouse Portal.

Late afternoon on Zabriskie Point.

I loved the stark lighting on March 6th in Death Valley:

At the Furnace Creek Hotel...

... take a look at both sides.



Those are 2 photos I took from the same vantage point on March 5th. I highly recommend the hotel, which is inside Death Valley National Park. Our room was right next to that terrace you see there, and it was fun to walk down that steep staircase and out onto the gravelly path to look around.

Feel free to talk about anything in the comments, and please consider doing whatever shopping you were going to do anyway through The Althouse Amazon Portal.

At the Sunset Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

That's the sunset from March 4th, in Death Valley.

Titus Canyon, Death Valley.

From March 5th.

(Feel free to talk about anything in the comments.)

"The first thing Sam calmly said to me when he picked up the phone was, 'Dad, don’t freak out, but mom’s been in an accident...'"

"'...and she’s in a helicopter being flown off the mountain.' The mountain, that is, that she had basically fallen off."

... Imagine this for a minute: I was in India staring at the Ganges River, getting bits and pieces of information from friends and family in the United States [in Utah], about my wife who was in a helicopter being flown off a big mountain to a hospital in New Zealand, where we are living for the year. You couldn’t pick three other points on the globe that were much farther apart....

And, as my mind drifted to the worst-case situation, the vast majority of the thoughts I had boiled down to regrets. I wish I had spent more time with her. I wish I had hugged her more. I wish we had gone for more hikes together....

Over the following weeks, as it became clear my wife was going to be O.K., my thoughts started to shift from the regrets I would have had at the end of her life to what regrets I might have at the end of my own. “I bet I’ll wish I spent more time with my family,” I thought. That I did more climbs in the Tetons....

Interesting reading this right after returning from spending 2 weeks hiking with Meade in Utah (and Death Valley). I guess we were doing the right thing, but what most resonates with me is: falling off a mountain. I have a fear of falling off a mountain, and sometimes I faced it down and continued, and 2 times — at the Red Cathedral and Dante's View in Death Valley — I stopped and had Meade go on without me as I waited in a safer place. I'm not sure which direction I'm motivated to lean — going up more mountains or getting more closely attached to my belief that you can fall off a mountain.

What Meade saw at Dante's View:



What I saw:

Greetings from Pahrump, Nevada.

We've left Death Valley, where we were up at 4:00 and out at Zabriskie Point, lying on our backs looking at the stars, seeing the Milky Way for the first time in years. We were warm in sleeping bags, but it was windy and in the 30s then. We had the place to ourselves for a while, but as the light rose and the stars faded, others arrived, mostly with cameras and tripods, and they set up looking away from the sunrise, onto the landscape. I took a few pictures myself, but I can't show them to you yet, because my camera battery died just as the sun popped fully into view over the mountain and changed the colors on the beautiful landscape in all the photographs.

Now, I'm in a McDonald's in Pahrump, eating an egg-and-sausage biscuit and finally getting some coffee. It's nice to get some WiFi and a chance to peek at the news before pushing on toward Las Vegas.

ADDED: The senior citizens at the table next to me are reminiscing about old processed foods. Sample dialogue:

"Remember Hungry Man?"

"Oh, God, yes!"

AND: Meade texted me one of his photographs. The dark blue line shows the progress of the sun hitting the mountain across the valley:

From Dante's View at midday in Death Valley.

Then, down in that valley — a sharp-edged, incredibly rugged landscape called the Devil's Golf Course:

Good morning from Death Valley.

I don't know how much time I'll have to put up some posts. It's Monday morning, so I'd like to think there's no fresh hell to put before your eyes as if you haven't seen it yet.

Here's the view from the terrace outside our hotel room....



It's hard to blog from the Pacific Time Zone! I suppose the best practice would be to write late at night and get the jump on the rest of the bloggers from the dark side.

Today in Death Valley, we walked up Titus Canyon.

I'm not going to describe how windy it was. I'm just going to say: Look at the wiener dog's ears:



Eventually, the canyon walls had the effect of blocking the wind (as opposed to being a wind tunnel)...



And Meade put up with my slow walking camera wielding...



He sweetly amused me by handing me rocks he thought I'd particularly enjoy. Like this...



... and this tiny pseudo-petroglyphic heart....



... which I left in Titus Canyon.

At the Death Valley Rainbow Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

(And please think of shopping through The Althouse Amazon Portal.)

We walked up the Golden Canyon today in Death Valley.

I got all the way to the Red Cathedral:



But I couldn't take the final steep incline over slippery gravel, with a sharp drop off to one side, so I didn't make it to the highest lookout, where Meade took these 2 pictures:

Come on! Let's go to Death Valley. It's the biggest wildflower "superbloom" since 2005.

After record rains in October, the bloom started in November and went big in January. We almost took a road trip to Death Valley. It's at the top of my list of places I've been once and want to go back to. If I didn't have classes, we'd be packing up the car and driving right now.

#superbloom!

VIDEO: Death Valley blossoms in what may be rare "super bloom." https://t.co/qSSFYUJzzu #superbloom #deathvalleyhttps://t.co/PX9hqSNmGt

— ABC7 News (@abc7newsBayArea) February 13, 2016

High-tech-problem-is-really-a-low-tech-problem... Soylent Green ... Cocteau. My dear return readers will know of my recent travails with my digital camera, which turned out to be one of those high-tech-problem-is-really-a-low-tech-problem problems (a wall switch was involved, a variation on is-it-plugged-in troubleshooting). Another high-tech-problem-is-really-a-low-tech-problem problem happened again today, when Charter Communications set up my cable modem, but the cable guy recoiled in horror at the sight of my wireless device (Airport): "I can't touch that!" He will only hook the cable directly into to the one desktop computer that doesn't have a wireless card and checks it all out and I'm supposed to do the Airport part of the setup myself after he leaves. But oh it's easy, he says, just reconnect the cable to the airport and then run a cable to the desktop. But, no, that in fact does not work, as I eventually figured out. The cable modem will have given an IP address to the desktop, so the Airport won't be able to "pull" an IP address of its own. Solution: unplug the cable modem box and turn it back on with Airport connected. How much time did I throw away before I discovered the old unplug-it-and-replug-it maneuver? Hours. And a life is only made up of hours....

Ah, but okay, I like the wireless, now that it's working, and all the digital cable that got attached seems pretty nice too. I like the "Music Choice" channels, as I sit here writing, using the wireless. I don't usually listen to music, but maybe now I will. One of the channels is called "Light Classical." I can't read that term without thinking of Edward G. Robinson in Soylent Green. Am I the only one? In the unforgettable scene in which Robinson requests Light Classical music in Soylent Green (why am I refraining from spoilers? isn't this the most spoiler-ruined movie in movie history?), what is played is Beethoven's Sixth Symphony.

Once, I drove to San Francisco, then to Las Vegas, then back to Madison. I was visiting family members in those two cities, but I also cared about driving through Death Valley, between SF and LV. Driving, I was listening to The Teaching Company lectures about Beethoven's symphonies along with the symphonies. What was so strange and beautiful was that Death Valley coincided with Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, the un-Death-Valley-like Pastoral. In thinking about music not matching the visuals, I always think about Jean Cocteau's memoir about making Beauty and the Beast, which I could not more highly recommend. Cocteau favored film music that wasn't closely tied to the visuals. Put in the score, and let accident determine what sound went with what visual. The spirit of Cocteau was with me when I loaded up the CD player with Beethoven symphonies and drove across the vast wastelands of the American west.