Death Valley Daze

The NewYork Times, November 1973:

Did God make this land? Warped, slashed, torn, squeezed, pounded, twisted, scoured, then set afire? Or was it, as some say, conjured by the Devil himself? In the 1900’s, newspapers syndicated a photograph of one J.R. Wilson, who worked the graveyard shift and the Coffin Mine near Tombstone Flat in the Funeral Mountains on the easterm rim of Death Valley. The map of Death Valley shows Hell’s Gate, Poison Spring, Devi’s Golf Course, Bloody Gap, Skeleton Mine, Desolation Canyon. Starvation Canyon, Coffin Canyon, Suicide Pass, Deadman’s Pass, Deadman’s Gulch, and the Last Chance Mountains. Not exactly names to entice a three-children family in a Nimrod Camper!

It was ghastly how you could shrivel with thirst in Death Valley, but even stranger how you could drown here in minutes. Death Valley’s annual rainfall was a paltry 1.68 inches, but it could come down all at once in a summer cloudburst. With no vegetation to trap the downpour, it caused flash floods—stirring up a lurid frothy soup of mud, rocks, tangled brambles that avalanched down the mountains and careened in high walls across the valley floor. Rolling bathtub-size boulders, wiping out roads or blocking them, blanketing everything in mud and making any creature stuck in a canyon a water-logged corpse in minutes.

Color is the desert’s only clock

Entering Death Valley is intruding upon some Paleolithic time, into a prehistoric loneliness unknown to man. The dried river beds hide dinosaur spirits in their folds, and there is only the sound of a million year old wind. Color is the desert’s only clock: The traveling sun turns buff mud hills to champagne, then saffron, then streaks them with cinnamon. Salt flats dazzle platinum, then tinge with pink. Mountains marble blue to purple. Dusk opalesces the sky. And on days when clouds shroud the sun, time disappears.

In winter the clarity of the undusted sky extends the vision for hundreds of miles. From Dante’s View, the valley’s eeriest landscape, you can stand on a cliff edge gazing across to Death Valley’s highest mountain, the snow-capped Telescope Peak in the Panamints, 11,049 feet above sea level, and down into the salty carpet of Badwater a mile below, and the Devil’s Golf Course, the lowest point in the Western hemisphere.

Two billion years of geologic history

Death Valley’s geological formations may come nearer to revealing the mystery of the creation of this earth than any other group of mountains and chasms. With buttes, alluvial fans, sand dunes, volcanic craters, playas, and fault scarps, no other place on earth gives so many clues to the natural forces still sculpting the earth. Death Valley is not really a “valley” carved by river action, but a trough-shaped “graben” formed when the mountains raised up and the earth below them sank, scarcely a million years ago. That’s only a second in geologic time, yet the rocks here reflect two billion years of the earth’s geologic history.

Sandstorms, heat funnels, water spouts—Death Valley has some pretty peculiar natural phenomena, but the strangest are the moving rocks. On a 2 3/4 mile long cracked mud playa called "The Racetrack," 600-pound boulders mysteriously zip across the ground by themselves, furrowing straight, curved and even zig-zag tracks 200 to 800 feet long, and ones that even double back on themselves. The geologic explanation is that a slick, wet or frozen surface on this very flat dry lake bed and a gust of wind 100 miles an hour, are enough to send these rocks skidding.

The Forty-Niners and the rip-snorting one-blanket prospectors who came after them pillaged Death Valley for its gold, silver, copper, lead, talc, asbestos and borax, leaving isolated desert graves and ghost towns in their wakes. Rhyylite, Panamint City, Leadfield, Skidoo, Bullfrog, Chloride Cliff—these were the roistering, brawling boom-or-bust towns attracting gunslinging saloon keepers, prostitutes and preachers and thousands more. Today’s prospectors are rock hounds digging for moonstones, geodes, onyx, agate, turquoise, obsidian, pyrite, jasper, honey opal, tungsten, calcite and a variety of fossils in the nearby Owl’s Head Mountains.

Leather-skinned Shoshone, glassy-eyed grubstakers—they possess this land still, for they met it on its own terms, fighting its heat delirium and sand storms, gaggin on its briny water, eating its insects and pinon nuts, bedding down with its scorpions. Who would live here but misanthropes, heliolaters, mad geologists and jackass prospectors?

Why live in Death Valley?

Why live in such a remote, God-forsaken place? Well I suppose a National Park has to have rangers, and so I pestered ranger Frank Ackerman about why he chose Death Valley. “Death Valley is one of the best assignments in the National Parks system.”he said. “There are things to learn here that can't be learned anywhere else on the continent. Death Valley is the largest single desert unit in North America. If you wanted to cover the geologic span represented here, you’d have to make separate trips to the Grand Canyon, Salt Lake City, Craters of the Moon, Glacier National Park, Mount Rainier, Crater Lake and then Los Angeles.”

Pretty awesome, if your passion is geology. I found it amazing that Death Valley had a postal zip code and a telephone book:  The 1972 edition in my room at the luxurious Furnace Creek Inn and Ranch was a 6” x 9” tome with five-and-a-half-pages and 62 addresses that included the towns of Baker, Shoshone and Tecopa. Most of the phone numbers in Death Valley’s phone book belonged to the people who worked at the Furnace Creek Inn and Ranch and the Stove Pipe Wells Hotel, and the Death Valley park rangers in straight-brimmed Stetsons. I figured that the best way to find out why anyone would choose to live in the most desolate area in the U. S. was just to ring them up and ask them. 

Death Valley picks you

The first person I called was Tom Williams and the first thing he said to me was “The people don’t pick the desert; the desert picks the people.” Five years ago this New York advertising man had been en route from New York City to Las Vegas with his wife Marta Beckette, and artist-dancer born on Bleecker Street, in the heart of Greenwich Village. On the way to Vegas, Tom and Marta had a flat tire at Death Valley Junction, pop. 16. “Marta saw the deserted old movie theater,” says Tom, “and within hours we had made up our minds to settle here. The people living here are all mutually dependent on one another, running the hotel, gas station, cafe, general store and beauty parlor. We just have the same old $5 bill that goes round and round.”

The Amargosa Opera House

Marta Becket was a visionary. Despite the fact in the desert there was no one for miles around who could serve as an audience, this lithe brunette wanted an opera house in which to perform her modern dances. So while she and her husband Tom lived in a cluster of adobe buildings they rented for $50 a month, and he worked as a job printer and she sold her paintings, they transformed the crumbling movie theatre into The Amargosa Opera House.

The curtain went up in February of 1968 with Marta as dance-mime, comedienne/tragedienne, and Tom as manager, emcee and stage-hand. Marta practiced every day, performing her one-woman show with 15 costume changes three nights a week—often to an empty hall. Then, so she wouldn’t feel lonely when nobody showed up to her performances, she painted her own audience—a magical mural of colorful spectators—on the rear wall of the opera house.

Scotty’s Castle

An opera House on the edge of a desert may seem strange, but a grandiose castle—with 18 fireplaces, 50-foot ceiling, a jasper fountain, goatskin curtains, Mediterranean tiles, ornate tapestries, a chiming clock tower and a 1,600 pipe organ rigged up to play duets—smack in the middle of the desert is even stranger. Death Valley’s best-known eccentric is the flamboyant character who built the castle, Death Valley Scotty.

Walter Scott was a Kentucky-born lad who left or ran away from home at age ten somewhere around 1878 and headed for the mining towns of Nevada. After working with a desert survey crew and mule team drivers, he became a cowboy in Wyoming, then took up with Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show as a trick rider. Twelve years on the road with Cody, travelling around America and Europe, gave Scott a taste for the fabulous.

After he left Cody’s show he headed for Death Valley to go prospectin’. Some time after that, he was seen throwing silver dollars to astonished crowds, and hiring a whole Santa Fe train to run him from Los Angeles to Chicago—in a record 44 hours and 54 minutes. What was that Chicago connection all about? In 1922, Walter Scott and the Chicago millionaire named Albert Johnson, whom Scott lured into the desert to improve his health, built the fabulous Moorish mansion with battlement towers and buttressed walls that today is known as Scotty’s Castle.

Death Valley Helen

I’d met some of Death Valley’s other eccentrics, including Death Valley Helen (alias Diamond Lil Wallace) from Wilmington, California, who was going on 80 but still had her figure, and 20 pairs of high-button shoes, 100 antique dresses and a blue net sequined coat, which she wore only a few minutes at a time.

She wasn’t wearing it the cold November morning I met her—shivering in bare arms on the Death Valley sand dunes in a short dress of fuchsia satin and ostrich feathers, high-button shoes, black lace sequined stockings and red corkscrew curls crowned by a diamond tiara. Paunchy male Forty-niners were stretched on their stomachs to photograph her in the dawn’s early light, while their jealous pot-bellied wives in Capri pants, white heels and jangling ear baubles looked on.

Red-head Diamond Lil was back for her yearly appearance at the Death Valley ‘49ers Veteran’s Day Encampment. Over 35,000 trailer owners mobbed the National Monument's nine campgrounds for the celebrations at Furnace Creek, which featured hootenanny breakfasts, chuck wagon lunches, flap-jack eating burro races, desert hikes, fiddler contests and square dancing under the stars.

Later Death Valley Helen told me that she had once been a sad and lonely person. Then she had learned to sew and started making her own costumes, embroidering sequins on everything she made by hand and performing—at what I wasn’t sure—in Beattie and Calico. “Write to me honey,” she said. “Here’s my card. I have so many people writin’ to me honey, you wouldn’t believe. Authors, ministers… God bless you, honey.” 

Meeting a Death Valley Survivor

After I returned from my Death Valley trip, I was determined to stay in San Francisco. I wrote to the editors of the Saturday Review, which had just moved its offices from Manhattan, and to the San Francisco Chronicle, pitching them some story ideas, and I found a studio apartment downtown, right on the cable car line, on Powell Street between Pine and Sutter. Today that apartment—a few blocks from Union Square—has a million dollar address, but back then my rent was less than a hundred bucks a month. One morning I was sitting with my cup of coffee on the pull-down Murphy bed of my newly-rented San Francisco digs. As the cable car went clanging by with tourists staring in my bay window—as they did every nine minutes—I was staring at page one of the final edition of the Monday, December 11, 1972 San Francisco Chronicle. 

A Walrus in the Waters?

The front page featured the oddest photo of a walrus in a Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken cap. Closer inspection showed that it was a black-and-white striped prison convict’s cap on a man’s head, which was sticking out of the 50˚F water of the San Francisco Bay. Under an ornery east wind, with the ebb tide and white caps moving at one knot, British adventurer Kenneth Crutchlow was swimming to shore from The Rock—Alcatraz—the notoriously nasty escape-proof island federal prison which held the country’s hardest convicts until 1963. Page three photos showed Crutchlow’s limp, exhausted blue body being supported by the men who had followed him in the rowboat.

Death Valley Jogger

What really grabbed me was the mention that Crutchlow had “hobbled across Death Valley as temperatures in the 120’s F were being recorded there.” This crazy guy had walked across Hades in July when I had been nervous driving through it in November, especially over the rubbly road through Bloody Gap and the 1,000-foot deep Titus Canyon, barely as wide as a car. Hot. As. Hell. So you can imagine my shock to learn that a preposterous stunt-mongering Brit had actually jogged 130 miles over this blistering Hades on earth, in the daytime in the 130ｰF summer heat, in 58 hours and 30 minutes—wearing a black bowler hat, vest and a dark blue pin-striped suit and a Thames Rowing Club tie. How in hell did Kenneth Crutchlow do it? 

Crutchlow was not hard to track down in San Francisco. The San Francisco Chronicle article stated that the 28-year old, six foot tall, 154-pound English adventurer was the director of the Cathedral Hill Medical Center’s Abortion Clinic. I rang up the clinic and arranged to meet Ken there after hours. Post Alcatraz, this tall thin walrus-moustached Londoner with the cockney accent was looking and feeling pretty good. He seemed easy-going yet enigmatic. In a small room that seemingly contained the entire contents of his life, a cot and a scrapbook of newspaper clippings, he told me about how he came to jog through Death Valley, from Shoshone to Scotty’s Castle.

Wrestling sharks

Kenneth had been having dinner on some continent or another with his friend John Fairfax, who did many dangerous things, including wrestling hammerhead sharks bare-handed and stabbing them to death with a knife. John had been boasting “Though I walk through the Valley of Death, I fear no evil, as I am the biggest son-of-a-bitch in the valley.”

Ken liked the ring of that sentence and tried to repeat it, but he garbled it by saying “Though I walk through Death Valley…” Then and there he decided that he had to take on Death Valley. He would do it all alone, without anyone trailing him with supplies. He would bury water jugs five miles apart before starting out, marking the spots with Union Jacks, and carry salt tablets, snake bite kits and as much food, water and as he could in a backpack. And being a dignified Englishman, he vowed he would not remove his suit coat along the journey. 

Listening to Kenneth Crutchlow’s stories made me feel I could almost go anywhere and do anything. His James Bond escapes, ingenuity, bravado stunned me. He showed me the clippings and photocopies—from the Teheran Journal, Malay Mail, Fiji Times, The (Singapore) Straits, El Informador, the Sydney Herald Sun, Los Angeles Times, London’s Daily Mail, Daily Sketch, and the Pakistan Times, to name a few. It was shocking how anyone could have packed so much life into 28 years, and do it in such style.

He knew the dope smuggling scene in Morocco, and the Black Market in Bombay, and had passed as a journalist by printing up his own fake press cards. And once, to stow away onboard The Bremen luxury liner from New York to Cherbourg, he had taken his belongings to a fancy shop on Fifth Avenue, had them gift-wrapped, then walked jauntily on board, announcing to the pursers that he was a visitor taking Christmas gifts to certain passengers.

Mount Fuji Mountain Murder

When climbing up Japan’s Mount Fujiyama, Ken told me how at the 8,000 foot mark he had fallen and slid 250 feet—onto a dead body! In deep shock, with his shoes in shreds, he was wondering how he’d ever get back down. Then Ken had what he thought was a bright idea. He took the good boots off the dead man’s frozen body, and thought he should collect the poor man’s passport and wallet as well. But at the very moment he was doing this, he was being surveyed by the Mount Fuji Mountain Patrol—through their telescopes. On his way down the mountain, he was met by the Japanese police, who accused him of murder.

I never imagined meeting such a world class adventurer—who had shot kangaroos and dug for opals in Australia, done time in an Indian prison after being accused of being a Pakistani spy, stowed-away on a ship to New Zealand, been shot at by Indonesian gunboats, bicycled from Los Angeles to Mexico City, and thumbed more than 100,000 miles—once around with world in 97 days with only $24 in his pocket, just to win a pint of bitters. I knew then that meeting him would be the closest I would ever get to doing it all myself.