Mysteries in Our National Parks: Valley of Death: A Mystery in Death Valley National Park. Gloria Skurzynski
again in his backpack, “…unit.”
It might have been his imagination, but it seemed that Leesa cringed when he said the word “unit.” She sure was impossible to figure out. Oh well….
“Here it is. Now I’ll show you how these work,” he said, and tossed the second radio to Ashley. “Face the window, Ashley, and I’ll do the same on my side, then we’ll talk real low.”
Ashley caught the handheld radio, then, turning it on, she whispered into it, “Go ahead, Jack, say something. Over.”
Jack pushed down the talk button on his unit and whispered back, “Can you hear me? Over.”
“I can hear both of you whispering anyway, so what’s the point,” Leesa said, unimpressed.
“Mmm, this isn’t a very good test,” Jack answered defensively. “If we were out in the open, we could talk into this thing and hear each other up to two miles away. Wait till we stop somewhere, and we’ll give you a better demonstration.”
From the front seat, Steven said, “How about if we stop here to look at those sand dunes? I want to get some pictures.”
“OK, but not too long,” Olivia told him. “If we’re going to reach Skidoo, we need to get there and be able to drive back in time for my meeting.”
The dunes were worth the stop. From a distance they looked like Egyptian pyramids: golden peaks, with flat sides rising and then narrowing to a point. Closer, they turned out to be huge heaps of sand sculpted by desert winds. “I’m going out to the closest dune,” Jack said, “so I can show Leesa how these two-way radios really work.”
“You better not, Jack—you’re supposed to stay on marked trails in the national parks, and there aren’t any marked trails here,” Ashley warned him.
“In this case it’s allowed,” Steven said. “Wind constantly reshapes the dunes, so footprints left behind by hikers get blown away before the day’s end. Go ahead, Jack. Walk out there so you’ll give some perspective to my pictures of the dunes.”
“But make it quick, please,” Olivia told him.
Jack tried to run fast, but running in sand was like being in a dream where you want to get away from something that’s chasing you, but you can only move in slow motion. With every step he kept sinking into the soft sand; finally, after he’d gone about a hundred yards, he gave up. “Ashley, do you read me?” he asked into the radio.
“Read you loud and clear. Say something else, and I’ll let Leesa hold this handset so she can hear you, too.” In the distance, he could see Ashley hand the radio to Leesa, instructing her to press the button while she spoke into it.
“Hi, Leesa,” he said. “I have sand in my shoes.”
“I heard that,” Leesa answered. “This thing’s really cool. But your mother says you’re supposed to come back here.”
“Be right there. Over and out.”
At the Land Cruiser, as Jack was dumping sand out of his shoes, Steven exclaimed, “Hey, guys, look at those dust devils to the west of us!” Less than a mile ahead of them, wind had whipped sand and dust into half a dozen high whirlwinds that danced on the rim of the hills, all in a row, like a chorus line of phantoms.
“What would it be like in the middle of one of those things?” Ashley asked.
“Hard to breathe,” Steven answered. “And you couldn’t see much. Dust devils are like little tornadoes, but not as violent. So if you were inside one of those baby twisters, you wouldn’t get sucked up like you would in a tornado, but it wouldn’t be much fun.”
“OK, guys, we better go,” Olivia urged. “There’s a restaurant up ahead a little way, but if no one’s too hungry, I think we ought to keep going and see Ashley’s ghost town first, then we can eat on the way back. That way, if we’re running late, we’ll just pick up a pizza and take it with us.”
Since they’d finished breakfast not much more than two hours earlier, everyone agreed to that plan. The drive was already turning out to be longer than they’d expected, and after another half hour Ashley yelled, “Stop the car!”
“Why? Are we at Skidoo?” Jack wanted to know.
“No, not yet, but Dad—you gotta get a picture of those rocks. Do you see them? They look like ghost heads,” Ashley declared. “Like a whole lot of skulls lined up in a haunted house.”
Squinting a little, Jack guessed he could see what she was talking about: A thick, dark, craggy layer of rock rested on an almost white layer at the top of a high cliff. The dark rock had eroded into shapes that Ashley, with her big imagination, saw as skulls, probably because shallow caves in the cliff face looked like empty eye sockets above screaming mouths. It would make a great place for a Halloween party.
“Death, death, everywhere you look,” Leesa murmured. “This place is depressing.”
Since Steven’s camera was still on the front seat where he’d put it after photographing the dunes, he picked it up to focus on the ghost heads. Not too far behind them, a person on a motorcycle stopped along the side of the road, probably figuring there must be something worth photographing. That’s what happened all the time in the national parks: Someone stopped to take a picture, and it quickly started a chain reaction, every following driver slowing down or stopping to see what was happening. At Yellowstone, if a bear or a moose ambled across a field, traffic could get backed up for a quarter mile.
In a few minutes Steven had taken the pictures Ashley wanted, and they were on their way again. Jack noticed the motorcyclist following, keeping a good distance behind them. He couldn’t tell whether it was a man or a woman. Leesa kept turning around to glance at the motorcyclist. Jack wondered why she seemed so interested, but he didn’t ask. Maybe she just liked motorcycles.
The drive seemed to go on and on, or maybe it just felt longer because Olivia kept looking at her watch. “According to the map,” Jack said, “we ought to be getting close to the turnoff for Skidoo. And there’s the sign. Turn left, Dad.”
The first hundred yards or so of the dirt road were fairly smooth, but then it turned into a washboard that rattled their teeth. “I hope it’s going to be worth it,” Ashley said, her voice quavering from the jouncing. “I mean, it’s my fault that we’re coming way up here on the top of the mountain. The ranger told me it was a special place to visit, but I—I hope—“
“Don’t worry about it, sweetie,” Steven told her. “I’m looking forward to it because I’ve never photographed a ghost town before. Hey, maybe I can get a picture of a real ghost.”
“Then you could sell it to the National Enquirer,” Jack answered. “It would rate the front page.”
Since the vehicle’s jouncing made their voices jiggle, no one said much more until they rounded a curve in the road and came upon the ruins of the ghost town—although the only ruins they could see were old mine structures, with their walls collapsed and their boards faded or fallen down on the slopes. No houses, no stores, no sign at all of the thousands of people who’d once staked their lives and fortunes on hopes of striking gold in these mountains.
“This is it?” Jack asked. He wondered why they’d bothered coming here. There wasn’t much to see. He started to walk along the pebbly, sandy, barren surface, and accidentally kicked a rusty tin can. When he reached the place a few yards ahead where the can had landed, he stopped to pick it up.
It was bent in the middle, squeezed into an uneven oval shape—the dusty inside coated with a residue of sand, the outside mottled with colors from copper to rust to the hue of dried blood. As Jack held the dented old can in his hand, scenes began to take shape in his mind. Some old miner must have opened this long ago—maybe a hundred years ago—to eat the beans inside. With pick and shovel, the man had dug inside the earth, hoping his miner’s lamp would catch a flash of gold in the rock that surrounded him. Sweating, cursing the heat,