We started from the central part of the valley, where the wind creates some constantly changing weirdly shaped sand dunes. Then we Then we inspected the place of the former mine and moved on further, to the very place where the salt fields start. The valley's relief comes gradually lower from the North to South and beyond the former miner's settlement there starts the Moon landscape - as far away as your eyes could see the field is covered with some weird mounds formed due to the salt evaporation and and wind. Not without some humor the place was called "Devil Golf Course". Farther to the South there's the lowest place of the valley, called "Bad Water". It is located at the level of 86 meters below the sea surface. It's only here that a small quantity of water gets stored, which is in fact a super concentrated salt solution.
But the most striking thing from everything available in the valley is the unusual coloring of the surrounding mountains. The mixture of different salts metals get the mountains colored in absolutely unusual light blue, pink, yellow and green tones. The best view upon the Western part of the valley opens up in the morning from the place called "Zabriskie Point", named after the engineer who was supervising the Borax extraction in the valley and who gave its name to the film by Antonioni. It is almost impossible to describe this place and therefore I will better quote Levintov: "The fantastic geometry of the white blue stripes, the zebra like washing board, falling down in the surrounding of the fantastic rocks: the gigantic organ with pipes-columns of the cherry color from the right, And standing upright at the angle of 70 degrees acute peaked layer formed from different geological layers. While farther and lower beneath - the panorama of the Valley of Death in reanimation mirage." Closer to the evening we drove to the non less remarkable place called "Artist's Drive" - that's the road twisting among the deep canyons along the Eastern slope of the valley. Here, in the rays of the sun going down, there opens the view upon a small plateau "Artist's Palette" - the weird mixture of different colors, scattered on the slope of another of the hills. Alla expressed the suggestion that nothing of the sort might be available in the nature and that the administration must be spending not too little money, giving a touch of brush to the mountains periodically.
There was still a long itinerary ahead of us, and the next morning, having driven by the steep spiral up to the viewing site "Dante's View", offering a view of the full valley, we threw a 10 cents coin down come back here again more times than just once.
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