The birth of a tradition

This weekend I hared off to Death Valley to escape the oppression of a holiday weekend in San Diego with nothing to do, and what's worse, no one to do it with.

Last year I did the same thing, except I went to Sequoia.

I sense a viable Thanksgiving weekend tradition coming on...

The first night I was too lazy to dig for my air mattress and the pump (should have brought the thermarest along!), so I lay on the cold, hard, rocky ground for hours trying to get to sleep. I more or less succeeded sometime around 2:00 AM. Yeesh. Don't try that if you decide to journey out there.

I was awakened in the morning by the playful shouts of the two little boys in the next site--they were too cute--and by their mother, coming to offer me cheese quesadillas and mexican coffee. Delicious. Those boys were troopers--their parents told me they had covered nearly twenty miles in three or four days. That's pretty good for a six-year-old.

I hiked around the desert and the mountains for a couple of days--not nearly as much, or as far, or as--I dunno--back, as I would have liked, but I saw some cool stuff. I took a picture of the National Park entrance sign, and of the elevation marker that says "282 feet below sea level" and of the sign, perched two hundred eighty-two feet up on the side of a mountain, that said "sea level".

Anyway, last night I packed up my tent and most of my other gear and wedged my air mattress, topped with two sleeping bags, into the bed of my truck and slept under the stars. It was amazingly, gorgeously, fantastically beautiful.

Every time I awoke during the night, I was amazed again by the magnificence of the sky. And impressed again by God's sheer creativity. He seemed to be saying, "Look! I made all of this for you, and I called it good. And I made you, and you are good."

Ooh! And I found Gemini, which impressed me too--but not as much as God's creation.

I was similarly in awe of the surrounding mountains. It was beautiful there in the desert, too. It wasn't the beauty I'm used to--in fact, the first time I drove through the Mojave (January 2005, with my dad, moving to San Diego), I thought it was bland and barren, and I knew I could never love that landscape--because I grew up near enough to the Appalachians to be at home with that pastoral, backhills mountain-y sort of beauty.

Turns out the desert grows on you. I even think joshua trees are interesting now.

Death Valley is a grand, sweeping, majestic place. You can see the earth in motion in its contorted mountains and tilted valley floor. And, man, when the sun peeks over the eastern ridgeline, the mountains come alive with color.

And that sky... It'll bring tears to your eyes.