Death Valley - Devil's Golf Course

The Devil's Golf Course was my favourite stop in Death Valley. It is a rock hard, gnarled jumble of salt and mud pinnacles.



The rough outcroppings are created when brine in a deeper layer of mud is evaporated. The high mineral content was deposited by ancient salt lakes and is added to by floods that still sometimes cover the floor of the basin. Wind and water erosion continue to shape the salt crystals in a pattern that is ever changing, but appears solid and permanent. Believe me, those lumps are hard. I knelt on a couple to take photographs and they hurt my knees.

The Devil's Golf Course is also a good example of promotional language becoming place names in Death Valley. It was named for part of a 1934 National Park Service guide book to Death Valley, which said that "Only the devil could play golf" on this surface.



Encouraged by the description of this weird landscape as being covered with "almost pure table salt," we simply had to taste the Devil's Golf Course.



The verdict? Saltier than Vegemite, but I wouldn't want to spread it on my toast.

Although I have given the official line above about the ongoing source of the salt, I do have an alternative theory. I think the Devil's Golf Course may be sustained, and even expanded, by the sweat of tourists. I personally deposited several drips of highly saline sweat from which almost all of the water had evaporated before it even hit the ground. Here sweat doesn't have time to make your clothes feel damp before it swirls away into the amazing humidity vacuum of the desert, leaving the tourist, and the Devil's Golf Course, caked with salt crystals. I know that you're supposed to take nothing away from a National Park, but I didn't feel bad about eating the salt here. I'm confident that Death Valley made a net salt gain from my visit.