The Real Death Valley

I've only been to Death Valley National Park a couple of times and neither of those visits involved an overnight stay. There is definitely something about it that makes it simultaneously fascinating and repellent. The terrain is extremely rugged. That people roamed this area trying to make buck with mining claims says something about our culture, but I'm not sure what. Even these days, safely ensconced in a modern 4WD SUV with a full gas tank, I would think twice about driving most of the gravel roads, especially in the remote areas of the park. With even a minor vehicular problem you could find yourself in an unpleasant situation. And if it's July and you didn't really prepare properly for your visit, it can literally become a matter of life and death. And by all appearances, that is what happened to some German tourists in 1996. It made the news at the time, but I never heard or saw any mention of this story until very recently. Just something I stumbled across on the Net.

Remote area of western Death Valley National Park [35 52 31N, 116 58 57W]

The story is very simple: in October, 1996, a helicopter spotted a mini-van parked a couple of miles up a dry wash in a remote area of the western part of the park. This was suspicious because this location was not a legitimate road, certainly not for a mini-van. A ground investigation determined that the vehicle had experienced a minor accident that disabled it. A license check showed that the mini-van had been rented three months earlier by a German couple with two children, and had been reported stolen when it was not returned to the rental car company. A query to German officials revealed that the family had been reported missing by relatives when they ceased contact and had not returned to Europe on their scheduled flight from Los Angeles in late July.

Law enforcement assumed the worst -- that the family had tried to walk out but perished in the extreme heat. A massive search was organized and conducted over several weeks, and some perplexing clues were found (e.g. a notation by the family in a log book at a historic site many miles away, a beer bottle matching others from the vehicle but located in what would have been the "wrong" direction for getting back to civilization). Unfortunately, after extensive, carefully organized searches over a huge area, neither human remains nor additional clues were found. The search was abandoned. Some people theorized that the accident had been staged so the Germans could disappear, but there was no known motive for such a radical plan. Others knew that UFOs were involved. Whatever the case, the Germans had vanished. And that's how the story would end...

...until twelve years later, in the summer of 2008, when a southern Californian with an interest in desert exploration heard about the story. What happens after that, you'll have to read for yourself.