The desert demands the last word – even though it remains a silent place of forbidding mystery, absorbing the sound of all other voices in its fierce terrain. A group of white settlers learned this the hard way in the fall of 1849 as they set out from the Utah Territory toward gold fields in the San Joaquin Valley of California. They called themselves the Sand Walking Company, based upon their mispronunciation of the destination toward which they traveled. Taking a “shortcut” recommended to them by the leader of a passing pack train, they headed into a 140 mile-long stretch of desert waste known to us today as Death Valley. It was a tragic mistake…
Twenty-seven wagons started into that long desert valley east of the Sierra Nevada. Only one of them came out. A survivor of that misguided party spoke of the dreadful sameness of the terrain, the awfulness of the Panamint Mountains, remembering only “hunger and thirst and an awful silence.” Two months later, as the only surviving wagon topped the westernmost crest of the distant mountains, one of the settlers looked back on the place that had nearly claimed them all and said, “Goodbye, Death Valley.” That’s how the site received its name.
But there’s another name the Spanish used to describe this God-forsaken land. They referred to it as la Palma de la Mana de Dios, the very palm of God’s hand. I think now, at the end of this long season of my life, that I finally understand why.
Beldon C. Lane, excerpt from Solace of Fierce Landscapes
(Click to enlarge image)
