We are at the Furnace Creek Inn in California’s Death Valley National Park. It is the largest national park outside of Alaska and one of the hottest, driest places on earth. Rain is counted by the drop and when some falls, it is indeed an event. Deciding we can safely begin our exploration of this land of extremes without umbrellas, we head for the salt flats on the valley floor.

At 85.5 meters below sea level, Badwater Basin is the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere. Left after an ancient lake evaporated and stretching for miles, the basin is covered in white salt. As we walk across its empty expanse, salt crystals cling to our shoes in big clumps. To the west, mountains rise abruptly from the valley floor to heights where real snow falls. Looking back to the roadside, we spot a sign high up on the cliffs. It marks where sea level is.

Also below sea level is the Devil’s Golf Course. Its surface is nowhere near as flat as Badwater Basin’s and walking over the lumpy, salt-crusted heaves is difficult and treacherous. The name correctly implies no one but the Devil would play here and we decide to hike somewhere smoother.

We couldn’t ask for smoother than the water-polished walls of Mosaic Canyon. The trail twists and turns through narrow channels of curving travertine marble. Streaked white, tan and gray, the rounded surfaces are cool to the touch. The whole canyon is a testament to the power of the water that sculpted it eons ago.

When borax was mined here in the late 1800’s, water was scarce. Mule trains hauling ore out of the Valley also pulled their own water for their journey. In a feat of strength and tenacity, twenty mules pulled three wagons weighing almost 40 tons over 275 kilometers of hot, barren desert in a month long round trip. Although the industry was short-lived, the mule train became a Valley icon and some of that history is preserved at the Borax Museum in Furnace Creek.

Mule trains crossed a monochromatic desert landscape but in the canyons, we discover ample colour. A drive through steep ravines and past chiseled rock formations leads to the Artist’s Palette lookout. Glowing in the afternoon sun are multi-hued rocks – yellow, red, blue, green, pink – like a giant’s selection of watercolours. In Golden Canyon, the towering walls of yellow rock are accented with the occasional green and a flowing canyon of golden brown leads to a vista of red rock cliffs sitting like a crown on a base of white boulders. From Zabriskie Point, we look over eroded badlands of golden tan, dark brown, red, and cream.

With sunset approaching, we trade the coloured rocks of the canyons for the undulating curves of the sand dunes at Mesquite Flats. Surrounded by purple mountains, the tall dunes have elegant forms and rippled surfaces that glow like gold. Feeling a bit like Lawrence of Arabia, we traipse over one dune after another. They have endless variations in pattern and texture, which give them their own stark beauty.

After dark, we head out into the blackness of the desert. With so little light pollution, the sky is a tapestry of stars. There are so many visible, it is hard to pick out the constellations and we can even spot Andromeda, earth’s closest galactic neighbour, without binoculars.