Early spring, late fall are best times to visit Death Valley

DEATH VALLEY NATIONAL PARK — Hottest. Lowest. Driest. Leaving Death Valley at that, however, is like describing chocolate as brown. You have to taste this storied slice of the California desert to understand its calling. Taste it with your eyes, your skin, your ears, your mind.

For the eyes, there are sights you'll see nowhere else on the planet: salt-crusted badlands 200 feet below sea level, walled in by mountains reaching more than 11,000 feet high. Sand dunes, marble canyons, volcanic craters, dirt tracks leading to ruined mines.

Some of the geologic formations — the sea-green and violet pinnacles of Artist's Palette, for example, or the striated sandstone ridges at Zabriskie Point — are so one-of-a-kind they'll stay forever wedged in your mind. Nor will you forget the way that, at dawn, the sun creeps in like a paintbrush, washing the valley with color, one crenelated mountain wall at a time.

In summer, when most tourists come ("That's when most people have vacation time," a park ranger shrugged when I asked why), the heat is like an anvil, pressing down on everything, all the time. It won't let you up, day or night, even for a minute. Daytime highs of 120 degrees are common; at night it seldom dips below 90. The tanks of car-radiator water strategically located alongside the park's steepest roads weren't put there just for fun.

Early spring and late fall are good times to visit, with cool nights and tolerably warm days. Or visit in winter when temperatures are pleasant — low 60s in the daytime, low 40s at night

For the ears, Death Valley has something most of us don't often experience: silence. Dead, absolute silence — or at least, the absence of man-made sound. Some visitors are frightened by this. They're the ones you see getting out of their cars and standing there with the door open and the radio on, terrified of solitude.

Far better to embrace it. Cellphones don't work here, and the few so-called Internet "hot spots" don't work so hot. But being off the grid has its advantages. It gives you time to think, for one thing. And there's lots to contemplate in Death Valley, especially in terms of those who came before.

The Timbisha Shoshone claimed the valley first, only to be pushed out by pioneers, gold seekers and borax entrepreneurs. Eccentrics loomed large. One who left an indelible mark was Walter Scott, a stunt rider in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show who conned a wealthy Chicago businessman into building him a castle — Scotty's Castle, now a tourist attraction — in this unlikely spot.