I wonder why anybody still need to go to Las Vegas given that the stock market is providing enough excitement these days to satisfy anybody’s gambling urge. I got to spend a night there this month – it was the staging area for a company sponsored trip to Death Valley.

(Click on the picture to see it full size, use a back button to return to this spot.) We passed through Las Vegas long time ago, when we were driving back to Canada after our fist assignment in Dallas. It was the summer of 1986 and the oil prices have just collapsed. I remember wondering every day whether I will still have a job when I arrive in Calgary. By strange coincidence the oil prices are crashing again (from a peak of $ 147 this spring to around $ 50 and this may not be the end). The 22 years in between provide some comfort, these days I would not be laid off, if worse came to worse I might get an accelerated retirement. Las Vegas has changed during those years, there is still gambling but also lot of expensive shops to take advantage of people with weaknesses other than gambling. Surprisingly the clientele does not consist exclusively of old people (which always seems to be the case in Louisiana) but a fairly good cross section of American population. The only anomaly is the large number of Chinese. The TV in my hotel room had 7 Chinese channels – that demonstrates that they are good customers. The make-believe has become more elaborate and it is worth seeing, but one night was just about right.

After spending a night (in a very nice hotel for a very good price) we drove westward to Death Valley. This was one place we did not visit during our trek in 82. It was August and the temperatures would have been deadly. The valley was very pleasant in November, spring-like temperatures most of the time – shorts weather. The Death Valley is the lowest spot in the western hemisphere, in fact part of it is several tens of meters below sea level. In geological past there were periods when it was filled with a lake and the surrounding hills were covered with vegetation. Would have made a lovely retirement spot. Today, however, a very small, and very salty lake is all that remains. Climate changes all the time – not just now, as the media chorus would like people to believe.

We had four days in the valley and that gave us a chance to see a lot of things. Including the dried out lake with moving stones. The area is not easy to reach, about an hour on a dirt road, something I would not do with my own car. But we had jeeps and they were rental cars. The lake bed is covered by dried out mud and scattered on its surface are rocks of various sizes. What is interesting is that many of them a 100’s of meters away from the cliff they must have fallen from, it is easy to see the tracks they left in the mud and yet nobody has seen them move. One theory is that they are moved by strong wind in wintertime when there is some water and the surface of is covered by ice. On the other hand, lot of the New Age Californians believe the area is an Energy Source and come here to recharge their crystals.