Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Bad News!

Water is rare and precious in Death Valley.  Imagine a surveyor’s disappointment when he couldn’t get his mule to drink the water at Badwater Basin. He wrote on his map “bad water” and the name stuck. But Badwater pool is not poisonous, just salty which make it undrinkable, but not inhabitable by certain critters designed for just such an extreme environment as this (pickleweed, aquatic insects, and larvae).

Ancient water fills this pool year round. Much of it began as ice age snow and rain hundreds of miles away in the mountains of central Nevada.  The runoff seeped into porous limestone bedrock and began a long underground flow through a regional conifer. It merges her at Badwater along with the fault line at the mountain’s base. Salts dissolve from old deposits and flow to the surface, making the spring water “bad.”
 
Badwater Basin is the lowest point in the United States at 282 feet below sea level. 


Here’s a close-up of the water.  Apparently, a very rare water snail lives in this water and you are not allowed to get nearer to the water than the boardwalks.

This is a close-up of the ground that is off the hard-packed salty surface in the next photo.

You can actually walk out quite a way into the basin on this hard-packed, salty surface.

After that amazing day visiting Mesquite Dunes, Harmony Borax Works, Furnace Creek Visitor Center, Golden Canyon, Artist Drive and Badwater Basin, we were blessed with this amazing sunset.  I took pictures as it developed so you could see how the colors deepened as the sun continued to set over the mountains.




 
And, finally, the sun has set and now the sky has this sephia look to it.  A perfect black-and-white photo!
 
Revelation 22:1-5 // Then he showed me a river of the water of life, clear as crystal, coming from the throne of God and of the Lamb, in the middle of its street. On either side of the river was the tree of life, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.  There will no longer be any curse; and the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and His bond-servants will serve Him; they will see His face, and His name will be on their foreheads.  And there will no longer be any night; and they will not have need of the light of a lamp nor the light of the sun, because the Lord God will illumine them; and they will reign forever and ever.

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