The Sense of Falling

The first thing I noticed about Death Valley was the impression of falling. First there was the sense that I was falling down into it. This is exacerbated when approaching from Pahrump, Nevada, because you cross a two-thousand foot ridge before plunging directly to well below sea level. I went downhill so long that I thought I had reached sea level long before I actually had. This sense of disorientation is not helped by the fogs and clouds which form over the descent.

The second sense was that of everything falling into the valley. To feel this, one has only to look up from the valley floor, and it becomes obvious that the walls are not, well, normal. I’ve grown up looking at mountains all my life; I know what a rocky slope is supposed to look like. But in Death Valley, the slopes look wrong. They aren’t solid slopes, but slow-motion slumps. You can tell just by looking that instead of assuming the shape of a fixed mountain, the rock has adopted the shape of a sand castle mid-way through the process of crumbling into the surf. But in this desiccated defile, the process is frozen, creating a sense of suspense. The world above looms over you, and you begin to feel that the rocks and hills may literally fall on you.

Finally, there is the sense of people falling, inevitably draining like water to the bottom. At the lowest point, Badwater Basin, a procession of tourists files silently off into the salty distance - pilgrims to the bottom of the world. The place is eerie, and I couldn’t help but be preoccupied with that same draw to the bottom as I stared southwest across the valley, searching the opposite wall for the canyon into which the fabled and tragic lost Germans had vanished twenty years ago. Then I turned, and began the climb back up.