A Quick Note on Some Sanity-Inducing Behavior

Death Valley has a lake. It usually doesn’t. A wet winter has turned the Badwater basin into a very large, very shallow body of water, and this is a development we probably won’t see again for a long time. The photo of the lake on the National Park Service website looks like this:

…though by the time we got there on Monday the water was very distinctly brown. Badwater is an internal basin, so that lake will be there until it evaporates. With the water and the winter sky, it’s a really interesting time to be at Death Valley. Lots of road closures, but the Badwater road is open, and we took the 127 and 190 without problems. I took this picture through a car windshield, and it comes complete with the little green dot you get when you point a digital camera into the sun:

We waded in the lake with a few hundred of our closest temporary friends, and came out with a crust of salt on our legs and a long stream of dad jokes about land sharks and flesh-eating bacteria. If you have the time to visit, highly recommended.