Word: creeks
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Australia. I ran into a Russian couple on a hiking trail, a German family in the visitor's center and a French family in my hotel. "Because there is no desert in Europe, Europeans come to experience the extremes," says Toni Jepson, manager of public relations for Furnace Creek Inn & Ranch. "They are almost disappointed if they don't feel 120º...
Although there are plenty of activities for the young--bike trips, hikes in the numerous canyons and swimming at the family-oriented Furnace Creek Ranch--Death Valley has become especially popular with middle-age vacationers and retirees. The 45-and-older set represents the majority of the 500 residents who work as store clerks, waiters, registrars, maids and guides. "The young look for excitement, the older for peace," says Jepson, 60. Jepson and her husband Calvin, 57, the Inn & Ranch's general manager, came to work for only two years but decided to stay indefinitely. "We grew to love...
...Forty-Niners. You can still find remains of a few short-lived gold, silver and copper mines in the mountains, but the real fortunes in Death Valley were made with "white gold": borax. The first big operation, the Harmony Borax Works (1883-88), led to the settlement of Furnace Creek. Borates were scraped off yellow badlands in nearby Mustard Canyon, refined by Chinese laborers and pulled 165 miles to market in Mojave on the famous 20-mule-team wagons. Remnants of the original wagons, with their giant, 7-ft.-high wheels, are on display at Furnace Creek...
...other major man-made attraction is the Furnace Creek Inn itself, built in the 1920s at the base of the Funeral Mountains. With travertine walkways, red-tiled roof and elegantly understated European decor, the inn soon attracted politicians, businessmen and, in due time, the Hollywood crowd, who used Death Valley as a backdrop for hundreds of movies, television shows and commercials...
...seasons here, is still discovering new things. There are the mysterious moving boulders on the Racetrack's remote dry lake bed, for example, or the beehive-shaped charcoal kilns of Wildrose Canyon. Just the other day Woodruff came across a scenic Depression-era back road that runs between Furnace Creek Ranch and Stovepipe Wells. "The magic of this place," he says, "makes me hunger for Death Valley more each year...