Another kid walks by with a Disney t-shirt. An air-conditioned tour bus is parked in the lot. Spring always brings people to the desert but with all the news stories of the once in a decade bloom, Death Valley is actually crowded, at least for Death Valley.
Flowers dot the landscape, but I wouldn’t use the word carpet the landscape, we probably missed the peak of the once in a decade bloom, flowers already seeding the sands for their next decade festival.
With a limited amount of time, we do the Disney tour of Death Valley. Death Valley has a number of attractions, no wait a minute, Disney has attractions, Death Valley has features. Our first feature is Badwater. A sign some two hundred feet over head on the hill shows us where Sea Level is. The salt basin in Death Valley is immense stretching over some two hundred square miles. At Badwater, you can walk out onto the salt flats. Chris braves the dirt and trampling feet to sample the saltiness of the salt and is not disappointed. Imaginative photographers stage pictures, people jumping in the air, head stands, attractive women doing photo shoots. I take a copycat of Brooke and Max jumping in the air.
Our next stop is the natural arch. The washboard road rattles Brooke’s car as Brooke debates the wisdom of the mile and half off-road adventure in her city car. The Natural arch is a mile hike in a fairly wide slot canyon. The adventurous climber can work their way to the top of the arch.
The artist drive is a one way paved road that winds through badlands, wending its way through the steep canyon walls. The artist palette is a rainbow of mineral colors including titanium and magnesium but the sign informs that the green is not copper.
The Borax Works pays homage to the brief Borax industry. 20 mule teams hauled the Borax out of Death Valley to the nearest railroad some hundred miles away. Not surprisingly, the industry only lasted for five years but its existence lives on in the off-the-shelf 20 mule team borax packages that you can buy in many grocery stores.
Salt Creek harbors the pup fish, a species of fish that lives its year of life surviving frigid cold waters in nights of winter and 100 degree water temperatures in the summer. 
These hardy species have adapted themselves as the salt lake in Death Valley evaporated giving way to the salt flats we already visited. The trail is a boardwalk that thoughtfully keeps the foot traffic up and off the salt marsh that these fish need to survive.
Last stop is the mesquite dunes. Nobody wants to hike the mile out to the dunes, so we settle for some pictures. 
And this is where we part ways, Max, Brooke, and Ian off to Northern California, Brooke wanting to get back on Saturday, so she has a day of off. Chris and I head South, our only plan is to avoid the freeway on the way back.