There's a place in Death Valley known as the Racetrack. This is a pretty
amazing place. To get there requires driving about 28 miles of dirt road.
The National Park Service recommends 4WD vehicles for the trip. It's a pretty
rough road, but it's possible to make it with a typical 2WD car - if you're
willing to go slowly and carefully enough. The biggest potential difficulty
would be encountering a vehicle going the opposite way on the narrow road.
The shoulders of the road can be a couple of feet tall with soft sand. It's
no problem for a 4WD vehicle to pull to the top of this to allow another
car to pass, but if two sedans approach each other, it might be difficult.
Ok - what's special about the Racetrack? It's a perfectly flat, dried lake
bed surrounded by mountains. I'd say it's about 3 miles long and a mile and a half across at the
widest point. Toward one end, there's a photogenic outcropping of rock that
juts up abruptly from the lake bed. But it's the opposite end of the racetrack
that is special. Here, stones break away from the hillside of the mountains
and fall or roll to the flat, dried lakebed. These rocks then sometimes move great distances -
sometimes a quarter of a mile or more -
across the racetrack. The rocks leave clear traces of their movement -
in the form of ruts - behind them. The dried lake bed is normally extremely
hard and dry, so it's almost a certainty that these rocks move when the
racetrack is wet. Long ago, it was thought that the
rocks moved via some kind of magnetic phenomenon. Now it's believed that the rocks are moved
by the wind. And indeed, if my visit there was typical, it is a very windy
place.
I hope you enjoy my photos of the racetrack at Death Valley.
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This photo shows one of many of the moving rocks at the
Racetrack in Death Valley
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This rock clearly shows that it was
actually plowing the earth as it moved with a mound of dirt in front of it.
The trail of most of the moving rocks also shows a slightly different pattern
in the cracks of the dried earth, suggesting that the rocks moved while the
surface was wet.
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The road to the Racetrack goes up and over a wide range
of elevations. Consequently the kinds of plants and cacti change dramatically
as the trip progresses. There's one stretch where the slopes up the mountains
are covered with Joshua Trees.
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On the approach to the Racetrack from the north, the
road passes by the Ubehebe Crater.
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Purchase photographic prints at:
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