.

We got up at five-thirty. At dawn the sky was a cold leaden gray, with a
dull gold and rose in the east. A hard wind, eager and nipping, blew up
the canyon. At six o'clock the sky brightened somewhat and the day did
not promise so threatening.

An hour later we broke camp. Traveling in the early morning was
pleasant and we made good time down the winding canyon, arriving at
Furnace Creek about noon, where we halted to rest. This stream of warm
water flowed down from a gully that headed up in the Funeral Mountains.
It had a disagreeable taste, somewhat acrid and soapy. A green thicket
of brush was indeed welcome to the eye. It consisted of a rank coarse
kind of grass, and arrowweed, mesquite, and tamarack. The last named
bore a pink fuzzy blossom, not unlike pussy-willow, which was quite
fragrant. Here the deadness of the region seemed further enlivened by
several small birds, speckled and gray, two ravens, and a hawk. They all
appeared to be hunting food. On a ridge above Furnace Creek we came upon
a spring of poison water. It was clear, sparkling, with a greenish cast,
and it deposited a white crust on the margins. Nielsen, kicking around
in the sand, unearthed a skull, bleached and yellow, yet evidently not
so very old. Some thirsty wanderer had taken his last drink at that
deceiving spring. The gruesome and the beautiful, the tragic and the
sublime, go hand in hand down the naked shingle of this desolate desert.

While tramping around in the neighborhood of Furnace Creek I happened
upon an old almost obliterated trail. It led toward the ridges of clay,
and when I had climbed it a little ways I began to get an impression
that the slopes on the other side must run down into a basin or canyon.
So I climbed to the top.

The magnificent scenes of desert and mountain, like the splendid things
of life, must be climbed for. In this instance I was suddenly and
stunningly confronted by a yellow gulf of cone-shaped and fan-shaped
ridges, all bare crinkly clay, of gold, of amber, of pink, of bronze, of
cream, all tapering down to round-knobbed lower ridges, bleak and
barren, yet wonderfully beautiful in their stark purity of denudation;
until at last far down between two widely separated hills shone, dim and
blue and ghastly, with shining white streaks like silver streams--the
Valley of Death. Then beyond it climbed the league-long red slope,
merging into the iron-buttressed base of the Panamint Range, and here
line on li