The Adventures of Fric and Frac: Adventure 193: Furnace Creek Resort/Death Valley/Post B

Frac bathed in the full moon.

Oh, my goodness what a day. And it started last night with the full moon rising at Douglissimo"s campsite at the Furnace Creek Campground. After arriving in Death Valley around three P.M. we made contact with my cousin Douglas who had pulled his Dutchman pop up trailer over from Las Vegas down from the Sundance Film festival in Park City through Phoenix driving at least ninety miles an hour (Those of you who know him know he drives with intent). We took dinner (BBQ chicken) to fix at his campsite to cook after the moon came up. While we waited for the coals to ready, his neighbor, Sheri, came walking by with her dog. Long story short and much flagrant flirting later (Douglissimo is incorrigible), she sat down to play cribbage with us. She and her husband are from Vancouver Island, and they're traveling as we are wherever the wind blows. She left several laughs later after two games of cribbage only to come back after dinner to enjoy the fire. Judy and I went back to Frac for the night. The next morning about eight-thirty, Douglas picked us up to begin our first tour of Death Valley (It seems so long ago now). We took in four of the most significant sites in Death Valley: the Borax Works, the Natural Bridge, Bad Water Basin, and Dante's Peak. Each was spectacular in its own way. All told, we walked Stumpy around for about three and a half miles (Good therapy, we hope). We returned to the resort at 2 P.M. and then lounged around the pool which is naturally fed from a warm spring. We topped off the evening with a stupidly expensive but fabulously enjoyable dinner at the Inn at Furnace Creek. (I mean, Karen Franz, this was some good food!) Dinner was the cherry on top of a constant string of marvels which were anchored by the natural geology of the place, and also by its intriguing history. A side note: today's temperature (February 4th) was a perfectly pleasant 70 degrees. By next month, Death Valley's daily temperatures will climb to the nineties. It is then that the place will live up to its name. From March through September, most days are over a hundred. There's been an amazing amount of human activity in a place so unforgiving. Naturally, most of the history comes from boom and bust mining, and life here has mostly been hard. The Twenty Mule Borax teams (Some of you remember the old TV show based on them), for example had to pull loads of Borax out of the valley for 156 miles to market. And of course, there were the "get rich quick guys". One story goes that some gold prospectors were trying to find a short cut to the gold fields further on in California and decided to cross the desert valley. All but one wagon was lost. As the last survivor made it out of the valley, he looked back and said, "Good Bye forever, Death Valley". The name stuck. As for those of us who spent the afternoon paddling around a warm pool in the afternoon light in our Sea of Cortez chairs, we could hardly think of hardship, let alone death. Instead, we thought: Life is good, especially today.