Death Valley National Park now offering a rare opportunity – kayaking | Hacker News Reader

Death Valley National Park now offering a rare opportunity – kayaking

edition.cnn.com

105 pointsmooreds41 comments

> Informally known as Lake Manly, the fleeting pool is about 6 miles long, 3 miles wide and just 1 foot deep.

That's about 1.421e10 liters of water, which WolframAlpha tells me is 3.5% of the volume of all living humans, and coincidentally the United States has about 4% the world's current population, so this lake has approximately as much volume as the population of the US. (Calculating the deviation in volume between the average American and the average human left as an exercise for the reader.)

I love this calculation because it feels like it is somehow significant but is actually mathematical doggerel. So great, thanks!

How much is that in football-feet? (Football fields covered in water 1 foot deep, like acre-feet except American, fuck yeah!)

It's 14.8 billion big gulps. I think that's about 44 big gulps for each resident of the United States.

Ah, now there’s a Freedom Unit.

"Americans will use anything but the metric system."

That’s fantastic. I propose a new unit, big gulps per American place, in the spirit of the other great American units, “large boulder” and “small boulder”:

- One Big Gulp for every Kansan is one Olympic sized swimming pool

- One Super Big Gulp for every Texan is about one Exxon Valdez oil spill

- 1776 Big Gulps for every American, times a thousand Americas, is almost exactly the annual flow of our own beautiful Mississippi River. If that doesn’t bring a patriotic tear to your eye I don’t know what will.

I bet badlands chug could do it himself.

https://youtube.com/@BadlandsChugs?si=v7WjRXTj1dW9M0Mj

Whoa, Big Gulps, huh? All right! Well, see you later!

You forgot to take the average volume of humans living in different countries into account /s

Maybe Bay Area housing would finally get cheaper if we could just convince all the Americans to move into that lake.

I’ve always wanted to bring some scuba equipment and dive into the one-foot-deep lake when it’s there, just so I could tell everyone that my deepest dive was 282 feet below sea level.

Skip the gear and tell them it was your deepest freedive

No it was a saturation dive that took years of preparation

When I went to Death Valley the first thing I saw were signs telling you how many people had died from the heat in that year. Then it started raining.

People can die from heat during rain. Moist air can often make heat stroke worse. Sweating becomes less effective in moist air.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature

You're getting slowly poached out there.

Seems ironic.

Real ironic was the day the LA (Los Angeles) DWP (Department of Water and Power) declared drought water restrictions on a day we got so much rain we almost had Lake San Fernando Valley. The Sepulveda Dam Recreation area did, indeed, flood. One of those "why do we have all these dams with no water in LA" moments.

As to folks perishing in DV due to heat, this is an extraordinary story worth the time. The "Death Valley Germans" https://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/the-hu...

(What is it with Germans and Death Valley in the summer? It's a Thing. I take it that it doesn't get hot in Germany?)

Last time I was in Death Valley the German car company Opel was filming a car ad for tv. My German wife thought it was hilarious.

It doesn't get Death Valley hot (few places do), and Germany has no deserts. Combine that with the German fascination with the Old West and you've got a recipe for disaster. They see the terrain, figure they can handle it because they go hiking in mountains all the time. They can handle the terrain; what they can't handle is the environment.

Germany does have a desert, though tiny(only second largest in Europe) and made by a forest fire followed by tank tracks over decades of training.

https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lieberoser_W%C3%BCste

That's a wasteland, but probably not a desert. Per the link, it gets 569 mm of rain a year; dry, certainly compared to most of Germany, but most definitions of "desert" run around 250 mm/yr (consensus, but even if the cutoff is off by a little bit, it's over twice that). By comparison, Denver, which is arid but not a desert by anyone's imagination, is around 368 mm/yr.

Ah interesting. In German the definition is based on the lack of vegetation, not the amount of rain

For reference, Death Valley gets about 57 mm of rain per year. It is extremely dry.

I'm making this a separate reply because I just realized that this is one of those language confusion things. If Germans think a desert is a place without plants, regardless of water resources, they will wander out into places that Americans and Australians call deserts, which are insanely dry, thinking that of course there must be water somewhere. In the US and Aus, if someone says "that's a desert", you should be carrying 10+ liters per day per person and some extra if you get into trouble. Do not assume that you will find water anywhere.

Germany has no wilderness. "Nature kills you" is a concept that basically doesn't exist in Germany. As a healthy adult, "getting lost" is a minor annoyance, not genuine danger.

See for yourself: Open Google Maps, zoom in on a random spot, pick a random direction, and tell me how far you have to walk until you'll find a pub or a road that will lead you to one. Repeat as often as you want.

The first spot I got was 60 meters from the nearest forest path, the longest you could walk in a straight line without finding a forest path was 400 meters, and the nearest pub was 500 meters as the crow flies.

The second was much worse: 80 meters, 800 meters, 1.6 km for the same three metrics. Third: 10m, 230m, 1.2km. 4th: 140m, 800m, 600m 5th: 55m, 380m, 2.2km unless you count the Kebap place 1.8km away. You will be hearing the Autobahn the whole time.

The weather is also much less extreme. 41° C (106° F) seems to be the current heat record (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extreme_temperatures_i...), but this is extreme, newsworthy heat, not common. Most of the time in most of Germany you can expect -10 to +35° C (from nighttime in Winter to daytime in Summer).

In summer, basically, t-shirt, shorts with 10 EUR in cash for the beer in a pocket, and sandals with socks will probably be all you need to survive. Everything else (water bottle, a way to navigate) are optional comfort items.

Somewhat related, it's hard to find things like Gatorade powder. "Rehydrating" on a serious mountain hike, the kind with 10,000ft peaks means stopping by at the nearest alpine hut, and drinking a liter or so of beer. I grew up (to age 13) in Germany but on adult visits, felt like a fish out of water, with my sandwiches and water bottles.

I feel like Germans get killed by bears at a higher rate than other tourists but that's just based on a hunch from headlines.

I went to Death Valley in early January. I didn't kayak but I did see the temporary lake. It's absolutely beautiful!

I went there once in January. It was absolutely perfect weather. No lake that year though.

After a rainy year like this, there are zillions of wildflowers in the spring. It's a very popular destination.

I went in… 2006?… when the wildflowers were crazy after a wet winter. It’s beautiful when there’s a bloom.

If you go remember to thoroughly clean your kayak and other gear so that you aren't transporting invasive aquatic species to the area. Even though it is usually a desert, you can introduce something that will be hard to detect until the next big rain and hard to remediate.

Scrub it with soap inside and out. Go have fun.

Interesting. What kinds of aquatic species can survive in Death Valley until the next moisture event?

Tardigrades, or maybe those things from Three Body Problem? :)

I think the question is about which non-native invasive plant or organism can survive long periods without water.

I don't think we need to use Death Valley as a test bed.

Normal practice is to wash all your gear before you visit a new body of water so that you don't spread things between them. I said normal as if that is the way boaters operate. Invasive species spreading all over lakes in Texas would suggest that the normal case is quite different here.

Since the responsibility for compliance falls on the boaters, kayakers, canoeists, then we are stuck with whatever they consider normal. That's the problem. A lot of people fail at simple tasks designed to preserve wild places for later generations enjoyment.

This sounds like an appropriate practice.

As a non-boater and non-biologist though, I wonder if Death Valley might be the place where the concern would be lowest.

FWIW when I’ve been in states they actually cared about this there were literal kayak inspection stations on the road. I think perhaps I saw this in Montana?

It is a good vector to check and ensure. I’m kind of curious whether it’s an actual common vector or not

It is a big problem and all it takes is one visitor who neglected to clean the boat they had used in an affected body of water before boating in a pristine body of water. Here is only one example. [0]

The problem also occurs for things that grow on land and can be pretty difficult to deal with. [1]

Ecosystem changes due to introduction of non-native species is a global problem. [2]

Texas is like Montana in that we have notices and instructions posted on many popular lakes and on the TPWD (Texas Parks and Wildlife Dept) website. The problem is that many people do not see these notices and they regularly visit multiple lakes during the boating season. I personally think it is a common vector. [0] https://www.nps.gov/subjects/invasive/aquatic-invasive-speci...

[1] https://www.fs.usda.gov/wildflowers/invasives/index.shtml

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7087615/

"Footprints in the lakeshore can last for years. People should walk on established pathways,” the release said.

What about paddle marks in a one foot (or less) lake?

I went after the park re-opened to see the lake and it was pretty magical. At the time they were expecting it could dry up pretty quickly. Pretty cool it's lasted this long. The lake history of the great basin is pretty fascinating, during the last Ice Age glacial period much of Nevada and Eastern CA were giant lakes.

Just visited in January of this year and the Badwater Basin with water in it is stunning. Seeing the sunset there in these conditions is breathtaking and a must do experience if you live within a day's drive of the park!

https://archive.is/ohSUA

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