Star Gazing Experience at Death Valley National Park

Death Valley NP is perhaps the most dramatic spot at day and night you have ever seen; the whole desert is full of drama! Death Valley National Park offers some of the best stargazing in the U.S. The perfect place for laying back and gazing upon faraway stars and galaxies.

Enjoy reading the adventure of Edna and Charlotte with the outdoors of the Mohave desert. Their tour starts at Beatty, Nevada. A town located just over 100 miles northeast of Las Vegas. It offers easy access to Death Valley National Park, off-roading, bird watching, hiking, ghost town exploration, camping, photography, filming, star gazing, and geocaching.

Beatty is located just 7 miles from the entrance to Death Valley NP, making it a smart choice for some hotel savings on your visit. 

The way to Death Valley from Beatty is across a shallower valley and through Daylight Pass at an elevation of 4,317 feet. First the road winds down around small, rough hills, at whose base the deserted town of Ryolite is situated. Ryolite is what remains of a mining boom. It is pushed into a cove of a rose-colored mountain, but desert mountains change their hues so often that it may not always be rose.

The ghost town Ryolite

The ghost town Ryolite is a typical American ruin. Its boom was very brief. The town sprang up over-night. Money was poured in. Water was brought for miles in a pipe-line, a railroad from Beatty begun, and permanent buildings erected–it had the pride of a “thirty thousand dollar hotel,” and a bank to match.

Immense energy and enthusiasm of youth, middle-aged greed, too, with its eye on the immediate main chance, went into its making. No doubt some people profited by the building of Ryolite. It was a tumult of “American initiative”–then it did not pay. It is easy to picture the promoters, their important hurry, their “up-to-date methods,” their big talk. It is easy to picture the investors too. Nearly everybody who has money to invest buys stock in a gold mine once. Great hopes converged on the desert here from many aboard-sidewalked town and prairie-farm; futures were built on it. There is a throb in the throat for Ryolite, fading into the mountain, its corrugated-iron roofs rusting red like the hills. The desert is licking the wound with her sandy tongue until not even a scar will remain. Sooner or later she heals all the little scratches men make on her surface.

The dead town faced a wide valley stretching like a green meadow to the opposite mountains. The thick sagebrush melted together into a smooth sward over which cloud-shadows floated. The sun evoked lovely, changing color-tones from it, like a musician playing upon his instrument, making harmonics of violet and brown and sage-green flow beneath a melody of pure blue. A perfectly straight road cut a white line through the meadow. The distance was ten miles, but no one unaccustomed to the clear air of the desert would guess it to be more than three. The road appeared level with a slight rise under the western mountains which had strong, dark outlines on the sky. They looked purple and their lower masses kept emerging from the main range and fading again as the shadows circled.

We felt the simple bigness of the desert, and were intimate with the indigo shadow under each little bush, and the bright-colored stones; we had time to make digressions to some new cactus or strange-looking rock. For hours we crossed the valley, hardly seeming to progress. The same landscape was always before us, yet we were in the midst of a changing pageant. Soon Ryolite was lost in a mass of pale rose and blue that seemed like a gate to another world. The knowledge that the mountains were made of dull-red, crumbling rock, and that only Beatty lay behind them could not destroy the illusion. It grew fairer as we left it. The dark mountains in front became formidable silhouettes as the afternoon sun inclined toward them. We could never quite see the canyon by which we were to reach the pass; several times we thought we saw it, only to lose it again in the subtleties of shifting shadows.

Soon after crossing the middle of the valley the road began a long, brutal ascent. Mile after mile it steadily climbed. Here was one of the characteristic mesas of the Mojave; nothing is quite flat there except the narrow bottoms of the valleys. Suddenly the road reached the outposts of the mountain and became much steeper through the sandy wash of a canyon. The walls on either side gradually grew higher and the sand deeper.

And then night comes.

A miracle happens and you know this is the same outdoors you love, only its trappings are put off, it is stripped of obscuring verdure, naked, and you find it more terrible than you thought it could be and more beautiful than you thought it could be.

The rising and the setting of that cruel sun are great splendors, that dark night sky is bigger and deeper than in kinder countries. The stars are very near, floating in a sea so deep it reaches to infinity; they are twice as big as ordinary stars, they look like silver balls. The sky is a deep, dark blue. The whole valley is blue in the night and luminous like a sapphire. The stars had an icy glitter and the wind made dismal noises among the fearsome-looking mountain-tops.

Best tips to experience the park at night:

While the going-down of the sun is a pageant; its uprising is a triumph. You feel as though you ought to clash cymbals, you feel as though you ought to dance and sing when the sun looks over the mountains. We always felt that longing and that bewilderment during the evenings and nights and mornings in the desert.

Near the end of the descending canyon Corkscrew Mountain appeared, a symmetrical mass, striking both on account of its red color like crumbling bricks and for the perpendicular cliff which spirals around it like a corkscrew. Through the field-glass the cliff was a dark violet and might be a hundred or more feet high. Corkscrew Mountain stands out boldly from its fellows, nor while we were in the valley did we ever lose sight of its sun-bright bulk. It became our landmark in the north.

Opposite Corkscrew Mountain the road turned abruptly around a point of rock. There, without any warning of its nearness, like an unexpected crash of orchestral music, lay the terrible valley, the beautiful, the overwhelming valley.

We all stood silent then. We were about three thousand feet above the bottom of the valley looking down from the north over its whole length, an immense oblong, glistening with white, alkali deposits, deep between high mountain walls. We knew that men had died down there in the shimmering heat of that white floor, we knew that the valley was sterile and dead, and yet we saw it covered with a mantle of such strange beauty that we felt it was the noblest thing we had ever imagined. Only a poet could hope to express the emotion of beauty stronger than fear and death which held us silent moment after moment by the point of rock.

Before terror and beauty like that, something inside you, your own very self, stands still; for a while you rest in the companionship of greatness.

The natural features which combined to produce this tremendous effect came slowly to our understanding. They were so unlike anything in our experience, even of the wonders of the outdoors, that they bewildered us. The strange can only be made comprehensible by comparison to the familiar, and perhaps the best comparison is to a frozen mountain-lake.

The smooth, white bottom of the valley looks more like a frozen lake than like anything else, and yet it looks so little like a lake that the simile does not come easily to the mind. Death Valley is level like a lake, it is bare like a lake, cloud-shadows drift over it as over a lake, the precipitous mountains seem to jut into it as mountains jut into a lake, but there the comparison ends and its own unfamiliar beauties begin.

Evanescent streaks and patches of color float over the shining floor between the changing hills. It reflects them. Sometimes a path made of rose tourmalines crosses it, or a blue patch lies near one edge as though a piece of the sky had fallen down. Lines of pure cobalt, pools of smoky blue, or pale yellow, or pink lavender are there, all quaveringly alive. At times the white crust shines like polished silver, at others it turns sullenly opaque. Now a blue river flows down the center – now it moves over under the western wall – now it gathers itself into a pond around which green rushes grow.

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The Panamint Mountains

The Panamint Mountains rise high above the center of the valley. Without apparent break into foothills they rise nearly 12,000 feet. Seldom, even in the highest ranges, can you see so great a sheer rise, for most mountains are approached from a considerable elevation. In Death Valley the eye begins its upward journey below sea-level.

The eastern wall of the valley is not so high, but is hardly less impressive. The Funeral Mountains are steel-blue with layers of white rock near their summits. Both the mountains and the valley were named because of tragedies down on that white floor during pioneering and prospecting days.

The Funeral Range is separated by a deep canyon from the Black Mountains which continue the eastern wall of the valley. This wall is from five to six thousand feet high, jutting into the basin in great promontories as mountains jut into a rock-ringed lake. The range across the southern end is not so high and was half hidden by an opalescent haze. All the time we were in the valley that haze persisted. Only rarely and for short periods could we see any detail in the depths of the hot basin, though the foreground sparkled in the stark, clear air. The Imperial Valley and Death Valley are always hung with misty curtains.

A long, long slope leads from the rock promontory from which we first saw the valley down to that shimmering pit. It is very rocky, cut by washes and sparsely covered with sagebrush and greasewood. Occasional little yellow or blue hills rise like islands from blue-green waves.

The ground is covered with little stones of every conceivable color, which flash back the sunlight from their polished surfaces. Unfamiliar green and purple stones lie around, and bright red stones, and a stone of a strange orange-color like flame. A mass of this is what we must have seen at Saratoga Springs on the mountain that bled. The impulse to pick up specimens was irresistible. This proved to be the curse of walking over the bright mosaics. Each little stone was of a color or texture more alluring than the last until our pockets became unbearably heavy. Every resting-time was spent in trying to decide which ones to throw away, but as we could not possibly throw one away on the same day that we picked it up, this was a fruitless occupation.

We could no longer look away over the valley, objects merged and vanished there. Everywhere bright heat-waves ran over the ground. The surface of stones and the tips of leaves glittered dazzlingly. It was probably no hotter than it had been at Saratoga, but the reflection of light from the immense white bottom of the valley was an almost unbearable brightness.

Keane Wonder Mine

Our next destination was an abandoned gold-mine on the side of the Funeral Range, the Keane Wonder Mine.

Keane Wonder Mine is an early 20th-century mine located in the eastern side of Death Valley and considered the best example of a historic gold mine that you can visit in the national park. The mine was a large plant which had paid well. A mess of buildings, some half-blown-down, pieces of machinery and the big red mill huddled at the mouth of the canyon where the mountain rises steeply from the mesa. The mine itself was higher up the canyon down which the ore was swung in huge buckets that ran on iron cables. Water had been piped from a spring a mile away, but the pipe was broken.

We were about a thousand feet above the bottom of that amazing valley, looking down into it and up at the still, white peaks of the Panamints above it. Opposite Keane Wonder what looked like a low, sandy ridge separates the main sink of Death Valley from a similar though smaller and less striking basin called the Mesquite Valley. The high Panamints end in a stern red mass near the sand-ridge, beyond which a long slope like the one we had come down leads to more distant mountains which, however, are a continuation of the range. Emigrant Pass through the mountains over to Ballarat starts from the slope and winds around behind the stern, red mass.

Furnace Creek Ranch

The next camp was to be at Furnace Creek Ranch, the irrigated farm in the bottom of the valley established long ago in connection with the original borax-works of the Twenty-Mule-Team brand. The water for irrigation is brought down in a ditch from Furnace Creek in the canyon between the Funeral Mountains and the Black Mountains and the ranch is a large, green patch on the sand.

The sudden springing up of the ranch was as unreal as any imagining. The fence was a sharp line of demarcation. On one side the sand drifted up to it, on the other were meadows and big trees.

The Ranch at Death Valley (for more info follow the link to the hotel on Booking.com) is the ideal place to stay with its expansive grounds and the casual, family-like setting. National Park Service Visitor’s Center is just a stone’s throw away.

The Ranch located at Furnace Creek is a complete resort complex located in the Oasis at Death Valley, one of the major tourist facilities in Death Valley National Park. It includes cabins, lodge rooms, a restaurant, a bar, an outdoor swimming pool, a tennis court, and a children’s playground. The ranch was originally built as crew headquarters for the Pacific Coast Borax Company and has four buildings with motel-type rooms, many of which overlook the green lawns of the resort and the surrounding mountains. The Furnace Creek Golf Course attached to the ranch claims to be the lowest in the world at 214 feet (65 m) below sea level. The Ranch at Death Valley is popular among both families and visitors to the park seeking convenient access to all that Death Valley has to offer.

Leaving the ranch we passed the old borax-works again, wound round the white and sulphur-colored hill through the spongy, borax-encrusted ground and along the edge of the sandy mesa where it begins to rise from the level bottom of the valley.

Next stop Emigrant Spring Campground.

All around Emigrant Springs are mountains from five to seven thousand feet high. One day was devoted to a stiff climb up to the abandoned mines at Skidoo, at an elevation of about 6,000 feet. A trail started up from Emigrant Springs, but it looked very steep, so we went a longer way around intending to come down it. Part of the route lay over high ridges from which we saw the splendid mass of the snowy Panamints, now close at hand. We passed little patches of snow in the shadows of the rocks. The sky was a deep blue all day and the air cold with the mountain sting in it.

The long narrow basin itself was covered with sagebrush like a blue carpet. The town had consisted of one wide street along which several buildings, though not much remained, it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The area is dotted with mining ruins, equipment, shafts, and the old mill continues to stand, as well as the old cemetery.

For more info on Skidoo Mill ghost town, follow the link to Tripadvisor.

From Skidoo we traversed the top of a long ridge from the precipitous end of which we had a superb view over Death Valley. That afternoon there was no play of color, no magical mirage. From there, looking straight down seven thousand feet, it was ghastly, utterly unlike anything on the earth as most of us know her. It was like the valleys on the dead, bright moon when you look at them through a powerful telescope.

We stayed too long watching the shadow of the Panamints, as sharp and stark as a shadow on the moon, encroach on the white floor. Twilight had begun by the time we reached Skidoo again to hunt the trail down to Emigrant Springs.

Getting lost is one of the easiest things you can do in the desert mountains for they are very broken, flung down seemingly without plan, cut by deep, often precipitous gorges. The same old, tattered pamphlet that gives advice about tin cans also advises about getting lost. It says that persons not blessed with a good sense of locality had better find some other place than the desert for the “exercise of their talents.” Standing on top of a mountain you think you know very well where to go, but when you get into those clefts among those hills that look all alike you find you do not know. Here is our article on budget-friendly travel tips with kids.