If the world really is going to hell, you should get your brakes checked. The ride is going to be very downhill.

I learned that lesson, among others, after my own brakes started to smoke while descending down, down, down Highway 190 into California’s answer to the underworld—Death Valley.

I did not run into the Devil on this Death Valley visit. The thermometer on these winter days never surpassed 70, and Satan, suggested one local tour guide, feels more comfortable this time of year in the hellish Southern hemisphere summer of Australia’s Great Sandy Desert. Instead, I enjoyed some hiking and the otherworldly vistas of mountains, deserts, and salt flats in Death Valley locations like Dante’s View, Hell’s Gate, and the Amargosa Chaos.

Despite such sights, Death Valley attracts just over 1 million visitors annually, about a third of the hordes that cram into Yosemite to check an item on their bucket lists each year. Although it’s located in California, the park is easier to access for Nevadans, who don’t have to go around or over the Sierra to get there.

This relatively lower number of visitors is healthier for the sensitive desert ecosystems. But Death Valley deserves Yosemite-level respect, and not just for its staggering temperatures or the damage that a drive to the lowest point in North America can do to your car.

Death Valley is bigger than Connecticut. It’s the largest national park in the continental United States, and one of the world’s largest sections of protected desert. Nearly all of it is officially wilderness, allowing adventurous visitors with high-clearance cars or backpacking skills a level of quiet, darkness, and solitude you can’t find anywhere else in our state.

Death Valley is also an extraordinary teacher. The National Park Service bills it as a “vast geological museum,” for the way you can see examples from most of the planet’s geologic eras.

Now, Death Valley offers a portal to our planetary future. As the climate changes, our world is becoming a place of extremes. Death Valley is already there. It’s at once the hottest and driest place in the country, and a place where a sudden, dangerous rain storm can bring snow, level hills, or revive ancient lakes.

Because of its scary extremes, Death Valley is misunderstood. Just as Voltaire famously joked that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor a real empire, Death Valley is not exactly a valley, nor is it dead.

It’s a graben, the geologic terms for a block of the earth’s crust that has dropped between two higher pieces of crust, often seen as mountain ranges.  And it’s full of life—with more than 300 species of birds, 50 species of native mammals, and even species of native fish. Its plant life is unusual (the beautiful evening primrose can only be found in one group of sand dunes) and highly diverse. That’s the result of the park’s mix of extreme low and high altitudes—the Panamint Mountains within the park surpass 11,000 feet above sea level—and its location in the Mojave Desert, a place of species overlap between the Great Basin Desert to the north and the Sonoran Desert to the south.

Understanding the way life flourishes in Death Valley should demonstrate that, as California’s landscapes and climate change, we shouldn’t trust our eyes. Places may come to look more barren, but they still contain much that is worthy of our attention and protection.

Protecting places of extremes will demand more sharing of responsibility, and more varied participation in governance. In recent years, Death Valley has received some notice for a novel system of governance that gives its Indigenous residents, the Timbisha Shoshone, real power in the park.

In 2000, after decades of activism and lobbying, the federal government created the first reservation inside a national park for the Timbisha Shoshone. Since then, the Timbisha Shoshone and the National Park Service co-managed Death Valley in the service both of protecting its treasures and allowing its Native people to use the park for their traditional practices.

The collaboration initially drew criticism from some environmentalists who didn’t want people, whether park visitors or the Timbisha Shoshone, touching too much of the park. But in recent years, such criticism has faded because of the powerful and mounting threat of climate change to the park, and the ability of the Timbisha Shoshone, or anyone else, to survive there.

As the writer and philosopher Margret Grebowicz described in a powerful January essay for the New Republic, Death Valley’s already scorching summer temperatures have been rising. The mercury has reached 130 degrees the last three summers in Furnace Creek, where the Timbisha Shoshone live and where overnight visitors to the park often stay. Such heat is drying up the piñon pine nuts and killing off the honey mesquite, both of which the tribe’s members harvest. The heat also makes the Timbisha Shoshone’s traditional summer migration more dangerous.

Along with the greater heat has come unusual rain, and the damage and danger of flash floods. Death Valley has seen a “thousand-year” storm in each of the last two years, forcing temporary park closures.

The 2023 storm—the remnants of the Pacific Hurricane Hilary that hit parts of California hard late last summer—created ephemeral lakes, some of which are still present. This includes Lake Manly, which last appeared in 2005 in Badwater Basin, North America’s lowest point, and is the remnant of a large lake that dominated Death Valley in ancient times.

After a Furnace Creek mechanic added some brake fluid to my car, I visited Lake Manly, which demonstrated one silver lining of our downhill drive to climate hell: there will at least be some compensating beauty.

To get to the lake from the road, you walk across white salt flats that resemble freshly fallen snow. The lake perfectly reflects the Panamint Mountains to the West. Its color is silvery blue, and feels not quite of this planet.

Several visitors removed their shoes to wade into the two-feet-deep waters. Among them was a Nevada church group, one of whose members appropriately recited the 23rd Psalm, and its famous lines about facing future peril:

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.

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After dinner Spiller exuberantly showed off a sample of “cotton ball,” a weird, semi-translucent rock formation containing borax. Spiller suggested to his hosts that fortunes awaited those lucky enough to find a generous deposit of the stuff. He showed them how to test for the mineral’s presence with a combination of alcohol and sulfuric acid. After Spiller left the next day, Aaron told Rosie he had seen a material very similar to this out on the desiccated lakebed of Death Valley.

That morning the couple set off to collect samples of the opaque dirty white bulbous material that resembled a handful of dirty cotton balls spread across the desert floor. They made a camp and (so the story goes) “when the shadows had closed in around them, Winters put some of the salt into a saucer, poured the acid and alcohol on them, and with trembling hand struck a match.” Watching anxiously, Aaron exclaimed, “She burns green, Rosie! We’re rich, by God.”

Getting rich by finding gold, silver, or oil is a California tale as old as the Gold Rush and as new as the Beverly Hillbillies. But the story of 20 Mule Team Borax is also the story of one of America’s defining brands, a product that came to sit on a shelf in every household, offering an only-in-America promise that by using this particular washing powder, immigrants from around the world could share in the heritage of the Wild Wild West and join the upper middle class.

Winters staked his claim in the middle of Death Valley and quickly sold the land for $20,000 in 1883 to William Tell Coleman, a Kentucky native turned San Francisco borax magnate who built Coleman’s Harmony Borax Works on the property. Forty Chinese workers scraped the mineral from the harsh desert floor for $1.50 per day, except when summer temperatures reached above 120 degrees Fahrenheit—not to give the workers a break, but because the borax could not crystallize properly under such extreme conditions.

Coleman used mules to transport the borax 162 miles due west to a railroad shipping spur in Mojave, California. The teams that later became infamous as “20 Mule Teams” in fact consisted of 18 mules and two draft horses. The animals were hitched to two massive wooden wagons with 7-foot-high rear wheels, carrying over 10 tons of processed borax apiece. Two fully loaded wagons with a full 1,200-gallon steel water tank and additional supplies weighed in at 36.5 tons. Just two men operated the wagons—one driving and operating the brake of the lead wagon, the other minding the rear wagon’s brake. The trip took 10 grueling days across the hot desert and was both monotonous—moving in a straight line was not much of a challenge—and dangerous on cliffside curves where an entire wagon train could fall off, driver and all. Specialized sections of the mule team were trained to angle their bodies while stepping sideways so that the preceding animals could navigate curves.

20 Mule Team Borax Soap Chips

 
Coleman got so much borax out of Death Valley that the market crashed. In 1890, he sold out for half a million dollars to Francis Marion “Borax” Smith. Coleman died broke three years later.

Encouraged by young employee named Stephen Tyng Mather, Smith capitalized on the “lore and mystique” of Death Valley by creating the 20 Mule Team brand in 1894. Never mind that by 1896 borate ore from the region was shipped entirely by rail; the company created personalities like feisty William “Borax Bill” Parkinson, who was hired and trained as a driver for the 1904 St. Louis Exposition and other promotional tour events across the U.S. When Parkinson died suddenly another man became the new “Borax Bill.”

Borax Bill, said an early brochure, spoke to his balky mules in language “that would not sound well in polite society.” If it seems strange that housewives of the time embraced the idea that a man with a dirty mouth would help them get their clothes clean and white, it helps to remember what hard labor laundry was before the advent of washing machines and sophisticated detergents.

Smith’s goal was to “put a box of borax in every home” and he succeeded at doing exactly that. By the 1920s the brand was considered a legendary triumph of American advertising, lauded for creating such demand that prices fell for consumers.

The brand’s popularity coincided with a push toward cleanliness and germ eradication in both the U.S. and Europe. Besides being promoted as a laundry detergent, borax was touted as an essential part of personal health, hygiene, and cosmetics. A 1919 advertising pamphlet titled Borax: The Magic Crystal read, “Perfect health depends on perfect hygienic cleanliness; and perfect sanitary cleanliness is secured by the use of nature’s greatest cleanser and most harmless antiseptic—Borax.” The product materials spoke in a kind of code to hard-working women who wanted to better their lot. Borax pitched itself as “a very popular powder for whitening the faces of ladies who are too much tanned, or have faded in some way.” The pamphlet said the product could remove freckles, be used as a sunscreen—or a deodorant—and soften hands that had done too much manual labor. The message that being clean—and paler—was the ticket to the American Dream was almost explicit in advertising of the time, which was aimed at a big melting pot of recent immigrants. As ad executive Albert Lasker told his staff in the 1920s, “We are making a homogeneous people out of a nation of immigrants.”

In 1930, the company pulled off another trick of turning itself into not just a shared soap but a shared memory of bygone frontier days, producing a radio show called Death Valley Days. These Western morality tales ran weekly for 15 years on the radio and then another 18 years and 600 episodes on television, where it was one of the longest-running Western programs in broadcast history. Ronald Reagan hosted the program from 1964 to 1965, and actors including Angie Dickinson, Clint Eastwood, James Caan, and James Coburn did guest appearances early in their careers.

Death Valley Days was Reagan’s last TV show before he ran for governor of California. In his ads hawking Borax, he is simultaneously a character of the old West, a glamorous actor, and the father of Patty Reagan, who shows how domestic Borax can be. It’s a neat trick, and it foreshadows Reagan’s uncanny ability to evoke a mythic past with a vision of domestic tranquility for political purposes.

But underneath all of the ideals of the frontier, of blockbuster marketing, and of the melting pot, what’s probably given 20 Mule Team Borax its sticking power is that it speaks to the core American value of hard, dirty work—even if it only took 18 mules.

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