We left Las Vegas this morning and were quickly reminded that we are very much in the desert hehe. There are still a few settlements scattered around here however, but why the hell anyone would want to live in them is beyond me.

It was hot when we left Vegas, but it was bloody sweltering at our next destination! 103F is a tick under 40C, and with virtually no breeze you feel every degree of it. Today and tomorrow we'll be exploring the hellish-sounding Death Valley National Park - the hottest and driest place in North America, and the largest National Park in the contiguous 48 states (over 5,000 square miles). Death Valley holds the world record for the highest reliably-recorded ambient air temperature at the surface of the Earth (134F/57C, reached in July 1913, which makes today seem positively pleasant!), and summer temperatures often reach 120 F (49 C). By contrast, overnight temperatures in winter can get down below freezing.

A lot of tourists chose to skip Death Valley due to the misconception it is simply an empty, lifeless landscape. Well they'd be wrong. Around here you'll find a stunning and diverse desert environment of salt flats, sand dunes, badlands, valleys, canyons, mountains, and wildlife.

Our first stop was Badwater Basin. At almost 100m below sea level, it is the lowest point in the US and the second-lowest point in the Western Hemisphere.

Badwater Basin is basically a large salt flat, and at this point we were starting to wonder if those tourists who skip Death Valley might have had a point hehe. I mentioned above that Death Valley is the driest place in North America. Well Badwater here receives an average of just 1.5 inches (38mm) of rainfall annually, and some years fail to register any measureable rainfall at all! It made me thirsty just looking at it.

To give an idea of how far this spot is below sea level, up on the mountain is a little marker denoting sea level :)

From 282 feet below sea level to 5,475 feet (1669m) above it, we punished the poor car up this steep mountainside to a lookout known as Dante's View.

Dante's View offers a spectacular view over the valley that actually is Death Valley, which is the area between the Amargosa mountain range on which I'm standing, and the Panamint mountain range on the other side there. The valley itself is 130 miles (210km) long and between six and 13 miles (10-21km) wide. Badwater Basin where we just were is directly below us somewhere. For hundreds of thousands of years ending 10,000 years ago, Death Valley was actually a large lake fed by abundant rainfall and snowmelt from receding ice age glaciers. As the climate changed however, the lake dried up leaving us with this.

Incidentally, Death Valley was named by a group of European-Americans that became stuck in the valley in 1849 while looking for a shortcut to the gold fields of California, even though only one of their group died here.

We then headed to Zabriskie Point for sunset, famous for its eroded canyons and colourful badlands.

The landscape here is composed of sediments from another former lake that dried up some five million years ago. Impressive stuff!

While there is plenty to see by day, the clear desert air, scarcity of clouds, and a great lack of nearby light pollution makes Death Valley an ideal spot for stargazing too. From snowflakes and bone-chilling temperatures in Banff to scorching temperatures here, we've camped in it all on this trip but tonight will be our final night in the tent. Phew!

Day two in Death Valley, and as scenic as it is, this would not be a good place to break down hehe.

Our first stop was way out in the middle of nowhere and completely deserted in the desert, which was kind of the point of our coming here.

The shot on the left used to be a train station, but it's not seen a train since about 1920. The shot in the middle used to be a school, and the shot on the right used to be a bank, but neither has seen students or money since about 1920 either. This is the ghost town of Rhyolite, once a booming though short-lived little community. The town began in 1905 as one of several mining camps that sprang up after a prospecting discovery in the surrounding hills. Within two years, Rhyolite had electric lights, water mains, telephones, newspapers, a hospital, a school, an opera house, a stock exchange, and a population of around 5,000. However, after the richest ore was exhausted, production fell, the mine closed down, and everybody scattered to the wind. Since then, Rhyolite and its ruins have become a tourist attraction and a setting for movies.

Playing on the ghost town thing, an open air museum just outside of the town has exhibits of... ghosts hehe.

This is a ghostly version of Leonardo Da Vinci's painting "The Last Supper". We decided to join the supper too, next to Jesus ;)

At 2:30pm, we went for a walk.

This is Mosaic Canyon, a rather ordinary looking canyon at first until it narrows dramatically to a deep slot with smooth, polished marble walls.

The canyon follows fault lines that formed when the rocky crust of the Death Valley region began stretching just a few million years ago.

If you like rocks, you'll like this place.

Our final stop in Death Valley: the awesome Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes!

While most people tend to think of sand dunes as being common in a desert, they in fact are not. Death Valley however contains three different sets of dunes, and they're a pretty amazing sight!

Due to their easy access from the road and Death Valley's proximity to Hollywood, these dunes have been used to film sand dune scenes for several movies, including films in the Star Wars series.

If you like sand, you'll like this place ;) So, after two very hot and sweaty days in the desert, we're getting the hell out of here and finding some air conditioning!

Straddling the border between Nevada and Arizona, this is the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River (which we've seen a lot of on this trip). The dam was constructed between 1931 and 1936 to control floods, provide irrigation water, and produce hydroelectric power. At 726 feet (221m) in height, 1,244 feet (379m) in length, and with a width of 660 feet (200m) at the base and 45 feet (14m) at the top, Hoover Dam contains enough concrete to pave a two-lane highway from San Francisco to New York - a distance of almost 3,000 miles (4,800km)! Such a massive concrete structure had never been built before, and some of the techniques were unproven, but nevertheless the dam was completed more than two years ahead of schedule.

The back of the dam, and the four intake tours which feed water to the power plant.

The Colorado River behind the dam (also known as Lake Mead). As per the colouring on the canyon walls, the water level is pretty low at the moment.

After leaving the dam our route towards our next destination took us back onto Route 66 for a short way through Seligman, Arizona - a little more happening than the last section we drove. Very cool!

The immense and dramatic Grand Canyon - created by nothing more than a river, and several million years. Geologists are still debating the specific geologic processes and timing that formed the canyon, but what we know for sure is the Colorado River and its tributaries have slowly (the latest theory is over the course of 17 million years) but surely been eroding and forming the canyon into what it is today, and in doing so has exposed nearly two billion years of Earth's geological history - close to half the age of our planet. The Grand Canyon extends for 277 miles, of which Grand Canyon National Park here is its most visited spot.

It's hard to put into words just how fucking enormous the canyon is, but suffice it to say it's fucking enormous!

As well as several lookouts, the park also contains several trails and there's pretty much only one direction they can go: down. The canyon is over a mile deep, and some clowns attempt to make it all the way down and back in a day, despite all the signs imploring people not to attempt this. 99% of those clowns inevitably fail due to extreme exhaustion and end up needing rescuing hehe. It is possible to hike down and back over two days however, and camp on the canyon floor overnight.

The distance between the canyon rims is about four miles (6.4km) here but widens to as much as 18 miles (29km) elsewhere in the canyon. Although the river is narrow by comparison, the terraced walls of the canyon are the result of differential erosion, which is "Erosion that occurs at irregular or varying rates, caused by the differences in the resistance and hardness of surface materials; softer and weaker rocks are rapidly worn away, whereas harder and more resistant rocks remain to form ridges, hills, or mountains." So there you go.

The Grand Canyon at sunset. Grand :)

Umm, got it.

Today we did what will probably be the last scenic drive of our trip, through Arizona's stunning Oak Creek Canyon.

The canyon is a river gorge, often described as the smaller cousin of the Grand Canyon. The 14-mile (23km) drive passes through picturesque forests and spectacularly eroded walls of a distinctly red colour, which are quite the distraction while trying to tackle the many hairpins turns on the road :)

The canyon is located between the city of Flagstaff and the small city of Sedona here, an awesome little touristy spot with one of the most dramatic backdrops I've ever seen for a city! It's also hosts the Sedona International Film Festival every February.

Just another scorching-hot Arizona day. The mist coolers were working overtime hehe.

Both Oak Creek Canyon and the area around Sedona are full of hiking and mountain bike trails, as well as other recreational fun stuff.

Damn, now that's a view - especially if you live in that $2.3 million dollar property down there! This area has been used for many old Hollywood productions, primarily between 1930 and 1970. Sedona's signature red rocks were identified to audiences as the terrain of Texas, California, Nevada, and even Canadian border territory. If anyone cares, the shot on the left shows Courthouse Butte and Bell Rock in the distance - both popular attractions.

Another famous Sedona feature: Cathedral Rock - one of Arizona's most photographed sights.

We headed to Oak Creek as the sun was setting so I could grab some Cathedral Rock shots of my own. What was expected to be a somewhat uneventful drive from A to B turned out to be one of our most interesting, and we were both really taken with this area. Something to think about if life in Texas doesn't work out :)