Drive to Death Valley, last December

I've been promising these photos for a long time!  In December I visited Death Valley National Park in California.  This is an amazing place - it sounded kind of boring but somewhere that I should visit to say I was there, but it ended up being one of the most visually fascinating places I had ever been.

Here are a few photos from the drive there on December 9, 2012.

We stopped at a salt-flat lake on the way there, here I am on the shore:

This is inside the park.  We saw an animal trotting towards us in our lane as we drove along the road:

A coyote!  This guy wasn't too afraid of us.

We stopped and took some photos of the road here, Ed took this one of the road winding up into the next range of mountains:

These gravel mountains remind me of the landscape around Arctic Bay on Baffin Island:

... and here we are coming out of the mountains with our first glimpse of Death Valley.

We're going to visit some sand dunes next ... don't go away!