Right now, visitors are flocking to Death Valley National Park to experience the forecasted EXTREME heat.

Death Valley is projected to set a verified world record for the hottest temperature ever reliably recorded, with Furnace Creek expected to reach 131 degrees with a low temperature at night of 101 degrees.

I’ve been to Death Valley a few times. It’s an otherworldly and mysterious experience. It’s a whole mind/body connection, the kind of heat that permeates down to a soulful, cellular level. Along with the magnificent silence, there’s really nothing to compare to desert heat.

Ten thousand years ago, Badwater Basin, the lowest point in North America, was once a hundred-mile long lake. It’s now a vast expanse of salty ground.

When you visit Death Vally, make sure you stop at Artists Palette, a technicolor, kaleidoscopic display of multicolored rock in that makes you feel you’re at an art exhibit.

Of course, as with the rest of our country, there were Indigenous People here before us.

The Timbisha Shoshone Indians lived there for centuries before the first white man entered the valley. They hunted and followed seasonal migrations to harvest pinyon pine nuts and mesquite beans. To them, the land provided everything they needed and many areas were, and are, considered to be sacred places.

I always thank the first people when I camp or hike, no matter where I am.

The shamanic ground markings of Death Valley tend to be found in the more remote parts of this already remote region – probably the reason why any trace of them survives at all. They are ritual and magical features left by long-ago shamans, probably of the ancestral Pima and Shoshone peoples, and they are fragile, so much so that their precise locations are not advertised.

They take various forms – ritual pathways, shrines, vision quest beds, scraped ground markings, strange sinuous lines, and weird patterns of rocks.

Vision quest beds are remote, subtly-marked locations where an Indian brave or shaman would go to spend a solitary vigil seeking a vision – a personal spiritual gift. He would go without food or sleep for perhaps three or four days and nights until the vision came. If it came at all, it would most commonly be in the form of what we would call an auditory hallucination: he would hear a chant or song.

Ritual pathways are probably the rarest of the shamanic features. a loose group of boulders.

The most enigmatic of all the shamanic relics in the valley are markings etched into the hard, sunbaked ground (‘intaglios’) or laid out with small rocks on the surface of the ground (‘petroforms’). Such features are collectively known as ‘geoglyphs’. Both types in Death Valley mainly show meandering, abstract patterns, but a few seem to depict mythical creatures. (Curated from https://www.ancient-origins.net)

If you make it to Death Valley, no matter what season, take more water than you think you’ll need to stay well hydrated!