Shoshone Village, CA

Shoshone Village, CA lies just outside the southeastern edge of Death Valley National Park almost directly west of Las Vegas and about 135 miles north of Barstow.  We drove up there to see a park and looked around this little oasis town in the desert while we were there.  The town and campground all make up one property featuring a café, general store, motel, Post Office, gas station and museum as well as the campground itself.  They are a welcome sight after driving up through the barren desert along Route 127.  The town truly is an oasis with trees, grass and an amazing hot spring at the site of the campground.

To me the campground is intriguing because it has a pool that is heated by a natural hot spring that keeps the pool temperature at 89 degrees day and night year round.  The spring changes over the entire water content of the pool every four hours.  Can you imagine?  The park also has a pond that attracts a multitude of birds.  I think I may have seen an oriole there with spectacular orange plumage.  A nature walk nearby competes with the pond for the attention of the birds.  Here you can sit and watch them from benches along the trail as they flit from tree to tree.  The campground purposely leaves palm fronds on some of the palms around the pond in which the birds can nest further attracting them to the site.

We ate at the café and then wandered into the general store across the street.  I could not resist purchasing a piece of rose quartz that reminded me of my grandmother’s rock garden when I was a child.  Sitting in my kitchen window in the coach, it glows a soft pink when the sun shines through it in the afternoon.  The memories of tiptoeing along the roots of the tree that embraced Grandma’s rock garden to gaze down with awe at the pink granite rock she had brought back from a “trip out West” has now gone full circle.

I also found a stone I want to make a necklace out of.  It is called orthoceras.  Technically I learned this with some research:  "Orthoceras is a genus of extinct nautiloid cephalopod."  In plain English that means stones of this nature date from about 400 million B.C. and consist of fossils most often set into limestone.  When polished on one side, the stone shows off the fossil.  These fossils are related to today's living species of squid and the chambered nautilus, are quite common and found globally.  Not being a geologist, I can't say that mine looks like what I imagine as limestone, but I like the pattern and it was only a dollar to acquire so I am happy!

Further up the street just past the town’s motel is a small park.  An array of road signs painted in a multitude of primary colors point the way to destinations of the world proclaiming the number of miles needed to reach each one.  Three benches surround the signs formed of softly rounded river rocks.  The rocks are all set into cement to create a smooth, comfortable and cool seat in the mild afternoon sun.  Sitting on one, I gaze up at the road signs and tick off in my mind all the places I have actually experienced listed in those signs.  I feel incredibly lucky in this life.  Almost a year after being on the road, I am still amazed to have the opportunity to be literally traveling down the road to see even more of the places those signs point to.

 

We head back toward Barstow and the mountains seem as if they are watercolors painted against the sky.  The desert is beautiful in its own way as the sun dips lower on the horizon creating shadows and a golden glow as the slant of its rays hit the uneven terrain.  We’ll return here some day and I will swim in the pool, floating in its lovely warm water and gaze up at the stars through the clear night air.  And then for a brief moment in time, I will know what others thought as they trekked across the desert a hundred years ago.  Finally finding the warm spring of this oasis, they too must have rested their weary bodies within its waters under the same night sky feeling the wonder of their existence.