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The approaches to Death Valley are appropriately lonely. Coming from either Las Vegas or L.A., you cross over the Mojave Desert by the California /Nevada border, through a couple of `one-stop sign’ hamlets which might afford you a burger and a coke out of a wooden diner, where you still expect young men with kit bags to burst in home from The Pacific War, and on through valley floors of scrub, rock formations that mimic Mughal palaces and dry lakes. On distant perimeters, the shale sweeps up into thousands of feet of gaunt mountain lines, irregularly crenellated; jagged ridges repudiating any growth and relying for their colour on the shifting sun

The midday sky in benign blue, patterned by jolly puffs of cloud, is a playground for military air craft which leave vapour trails like frozen ticker tape over the emptiness. It is little wonder aliens are allegedly so fond of this terrain for stop-overs. Perhaps they are betting on mankind having quit altogether .Is this grand emptiness what it was like before man appeared or is it what it will be like when he has self-destructed?

Move on from futile introspection by tuning in a country and western station. You car windows will be down all the way because your air con will be off to give the engine a fighting chance in the heat. The road ahead is a black strip to infinity. Stick out your elbow and tap the wheel. You are in American Road Trip mode.

You will weave down past the Funeral Mountains into Death Valley, the lowest point below sea level in the Western Hemisphere. Its called `Death’ because in 1849, a small group of prospectors , aiming for the Gold Rush, mistakenly saw it as a short cut long before there were three different hotels, a golf course and a gift shop down there. After a disheartening and rather dry couple of weeks, all but two of them got out.

The Valley is now 3000 square miles of US National Park. Before that it was the site of a bauxite mining operation and before that, the heavens alone know .The 500 or so residents work either for the Park or for the hotels. The three of those, an AAA Four Diamond rated Inn, a ranch style motel in a faux old West setting and a very basic motel on the other side of the valley, are all owned by Xanterra Parks and Resorts, the main authorized concessionaire in the park. Most of the blessings of comfort and facility that do fall on this sunny moonscape come from what Xanterra describe as their ‘stewardship’. Their aim is to draw visitors to stare at and cautiously potter around a huge geographic and climatic extremity.

The Badwater Pool, set in salt flats is the very lowest point in the hemisphere at 282 ft below sea level. Apart from a sign nailed high up the mountain side proclaiming `Sea Level’, it hasn’t got very much to say for itself. You are left to think it through. In June the temperature in the Valley can reach 120deg F. As one resident says, `The water in your eyes dries up.’ Some tourists, particularly western Europeans, who are short on extremes, choose mid summer to experience the heat. ‘And when they get here and find out that not even air conditioning can always cope with it, they wished they hadn't’ '‘said one employee.

The trick to this catered Hades is to handle it at your own level of comfort and take out of it what interests you. Xanterra seems to feel that pulse quite efficiently. The Furnace Creek Inn, the 66 room four diamond, is for the `carriage trade’, mostly individuals or small groups touring independently between Yosemite and Las Vegas. A brick and adobe structure from the Twenties, terraced three levels up the hillside, it was once the guest house for the bauxite company. It is a cross between an officers’ mess and a country club set, not in the tropics surrounded by restless natives, but in an earthly version of Mars.

The Inn has some unusual features, the favourite for me being the naturally heated spring fed swimming pool. Lolling in that near midnight, under more nebula than you could chuck a shuttle at is a fond memory. Another is the restaurant which was a bit ho-down, folksy for the prices with its farmhouse chairs and busy tablecloths but the menu is imaginative and well executed. I recall Rattlesnake taco with some pleasure. The journey the salmon must have made to get poached at the Inn beats the upstream push they make to spawn. Breakfast, well chosen, will obviate any need for lunch.

Rates can range from USD265 for a standard Hillside room to USD390 for a Luxury View room. The hotel is closed entirely during the baking months of May to October. The prices don’t deter pop video producers who like the insane backdrops, motor car executives who are keen to claim their new models survived the tests of the Valley or T.V. naturalist Sir David Attenborough who was there with crew when I was, doubtless waiting breathlessly for something squiggly in the scrub. He may have been studying the increasingly brazen coyote, which we were warned against being pleasant to. Emboldened by human food hand outs, they have taken to lying down in front of approaching cars and refusing to move until fed.

The Furnace Creek Ranch is a two diamond motel outfit described, in warning to some, as a `casual, family setting’. This is for noisier, cheery folk with kids who would be impossibly expensive to accommodate up the hill. There is a shop, a hearty thoroughly American menu restaurant and a decent pub all set up behind a façade of bogus wooden Old West frontages, stoops, hitching rails and wagon wheels which RV travellers never seem to tire of. Rack rates in the hotter season go from USD132 for a cabin to USD163 for a ‘Parkside’ room.

On the other side of the valley is the Stove Pipe Wells property, sprawling shadeless rows of rooms, anchored on another big earthy restaurant and bar and definitely for those wanting the experience over the comfort. They must not be completely wanting for money. A double room that actually has a small fridge and TV is USD108 . A room without them, sleeping four is USD85. These believe it or not figures would be put down by Xanterra to the `schlep’ factor- the cost of hauling supplies over those stark roads I had already travelled.

Likely as not, you would only stay in Death Valley for two nights at the most. There is a litany of suggested activities and sightseeing spots. Exploring a few yards into marbled canyons or standing on well advertised viewpoints are easy favourites. Hiking is a popular method of self fulfillment in the valley but there are ways of self destruction that go with that such as dehydration, blinding sunlight off salt flats, mine shafts, flash floods in canyons and black widow spiders that have taken offense.

I went touring in a car, first to Ubehebe, an impressive and quite unguarded 500 ft deep volcanic crater created somehow by a blast of steam and then on to Scotty’s Castle which you hear an irritating lot of in those parts. It is a Mediterranean Moorish residential folly built in the twenties in the middle of nowhere by a millionaire engineer from Chicago. With only his wife to talk to, he befriended and took in a drunken old cowboy called Scotty who, from his remembered sayings, must have bored for America. As the engineer’s fortunes declined, the two became closer until the engineer died and the old con man ran the place into the ground until he followed

The house is an interesting period piece with a mummified pathos. The Park rangers conduct you through, acting as period characters from the Scotty story which threatens but does not actually cross into embarrassment. At the end of the tour a great Wurlitzer style organ plays you a sad melody in the library and you leave a little downcast, reflecting on a dream that withered. The swimming pool was never finished; a large cavity behind a chain link fence.

My highlights were at dawn and dusk, watching the mountains move from sandy sunshine, into gold, then mauve then blackness and in the cold of the predawn, seeing them reverse the spectrum.

Death Valley is not a place to sleep late. Though every part of my being shivers to say this, be up before the dawn. Be in position for your project at a time of the day which feels near the end of the world when there is a cold blue visibility but no heat and no light. Take it from there and watch Death Valley come alive. Some guests were driven out into the flats with a guide and hiked back to the Inn as the sun rose. `Magic’ was the verdict. I was on the first tee of the world’s lowest golf course as the blue morphed into orange on the horizon. My companion there made a good driving shot but it was also light enough to see, in the distance, a pair of coyotes make off with his ball.

Outside Stovepipe Wells is a wide spread of sand dunes- desert in the style of T.E. Lawrence, this time. At their edge, the engines of brontosaurus tour buses gargled noisily to run the air con whilst small clutches of tottering tourists stomped out, sometimes hundreds of yards into the sands, going nowhere in particular with no purpose other than to be there and feel it. Seeing that convinced me that when Mars is ready for occupation, there will be no shortage of volunteers.

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