ARTICLE IN PRESS

Planetary and Space Science 58 (2010) 724–731

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Planetary and Space Science

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/pss

Racetrack and Bonnie Claire: southwestern US playa lakes as analogs

for Ontario Lacus, Titan
Ralph D. Lorenz a,b,, Brian Jackson b, Alex Hayes c
a
Space Department, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, 11100 Johns Hopkins Road, Laurel, MD 20723, United States
b
Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, United States
c
Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, United States

a r t i c l e in f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: We note the geomorphological and meteorological processes at Racetrack Playa, Death Valley National
Received 30 January 2009 Park, as analogs for those at Ontario Lacus on Titan. Although Ontario is 50  larger, the planforms of
Received in revised form the two features are nearly identical, both are extremely flat, and are in environments where infrequent
6 May 2009
rainfall occurs against a climate, where evaporation exceeds precipitation. While the famous moving
Accepted 25 May 2009
rocks on the Racetrack Playa may be exceptional on the Earth, the lower gravity and thicker atmosphere
Available online 3 June 2009
may render wind-induced rock transport comparatively common on Titan. Nearby Bonnie Claire Playa
Keywords: also provides field insights into the interpretation of remote sensing data from Titan.
Titan & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Lakes
Playa
Racetrack
Meteorology
Geomorphology

1. Introduction
The presence of liquid hydrocarbons on the Saturn’s moon
Titan exposes that world to geomorphological and meteorological
processes that have been heretofore considered only in the Earth
sciences. While the global oceans speculated upon in the 1980s
(e.g. Lunine et al., 1983) are not present on Titan in the current
epoch, observations by the NASA-ESA Cassini-Huygens mission
have revealed river channels with rounded cobbles (e.g. Tomasko
et al., 2005) as well as others with smooth, fine-grained and
possibly muddy if not wet beds (Lorenz et al., 2008). Radar images
indicate lakes and seas up to several hundred kilometre across,
and at least a few tens of meters deep, in the north polar regions
(e.g. Stofan et al., 2007; Paillou et al., 2008; Hayes et al., 2008).
These lakes have a variety of morphologies (e.g. Mitchell et al.,
submitted), from rather equant ponds sitting in steep-sided
depressions suggestive of possible solution erosion, karst, or
volcanic origin to larger, irregular-shaped lakes with gently
sloping margins more consistent with flooded landscapes.
Radar imagery of the Titan’s southern high latitudes shows
fewer lakes (Lopes et al., 2007), but a prominent feature, lake-
 Corresponding author at: Space Department, Johns Hopkins University Applied
Physics Laboratory, 11100 Johns Hopkins Road, Laurel, MD 20723, United States.
Tel.: +1 443 778 2903; fax: +1 443 778 8939.
E-mail address: ralph.lorenz@jhuapl.edu (R.D. Lorenz).
shaped, 235 km long, and optically dark named Ontario Lacus, was
identified at about 721S, 1831W in Cassini near-infrared (0.94 mm)
images acquired by the Cassini Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS)
in 2005 (Turtle et al., 2009—see Fig. 1). Ontario Lacus was
subsequently observed by the Cassini Visible and Infrared
Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) and was shown (Brown et al.,
2008) to have at least some component of liquid ethane.
A morphological analysis of VIMS imagery at 2 mm (Barnes et al.,
2009) suggests that Ontario may have a ‘bathtub ring’ of lighter-
colored material, perhaps indicating that liquid is being removed
from the lake, perhaps by evaporation. Some initial radar
altimetry observations (Lorenz et al., 2009a) are consistent with
this picture—they show a specular reflection characteristic of
a very smooth liquid surface in some places, but evidence (lower
and variable backscatter) of exposed lakebed in others. Further,
while the feature as a whole sits in a 300-m-deep depression, the
lake and exposed lakebed are exceptionally flat (see Fig. 2),
consistent with a lake whose bed is dominated by sedimentation
and which is presently evaporating. Radar images have not yet
been acquired of Ontario, but are planned in mid and late 2009.
In addition to the obvious interest in the Titan’s lakes as
analogs of terrestrial lakes, they are of interest in their own right
both as geophysical objects, and possibly as reservoirs of exotic
(Raulin, 1987), perhaps prebiotic chemistry (National Research
Council, 2007) (Fig. 3).
Bourgeois et al. (2008) have suggested that small and medium-
sized lakes on Titan may grow by regressive radial dissolution, i.e.

0032-0633/$ - see front matter & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.pss.2009.05.012
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R.D. Lorenz et al. / Planetary and Space Science 58 (2010) 724–731
Fig. 1. Left-section of a Landsat image of the Racetrack Playa, whose bright surface
is prominent. Note the various fluvial features draining onto the playa, in
particular, the alluvial fan to the East (see profile in Fig. 3). Right-section of a
near-infrared Cassini ISS image (Turtle et al., 2009) of Titan, showing Ontario
Lacus. A bright ring can be seen around the dark lake. Landsat 7 imagery of Death
Valley acquired June/July 2000, courtesy of NASA’s Earth Observatory.
Fig. 2. Cassini Radar altimeter profile across Ontario Lacus in December 2008 (see
Lorenz et al., 2009a). The optically dark section (‘the lake’) runs 150–350 km and
lies in a 300 m deep depression. The section from 150 to 250 km is extremely flat
and may indicate a currently liquid surface, while the region from 250 to 350 km is
apparently rougher but at nearly the same elevation as the lake surface and may be
largely exposed lakebed. Note the smooth ramp from 50 to150 km.
Fig. 3. Two transects from USGS topographic maps across Racetrack Playa—note
the 100  change in horizontal scale from Fig. 2, although the basin depth is
comparable. Note also the profile of the alluvial fan at around 4 km (arrowed).
725
by growing outwards when filled with liquid, and that processes
analogous to the formation of calcrete at the Etosha pan in
Namibia may occur on Titan (Calcrete, also known as caliche,
is a hard evaporitic layer formed by the deposition of calcium
minerals—on Titan, the chemistry would be very different, but the
physical results of precipitation of refractory organics dissolved in
methane might be similar—see e.g. Lorenz and Lunine, 1996).
While a number of large, occasionally flooded but dominantly
evaporitic basins exist on Earth (such as the Salar de Atacama,
100  80 km2, in Chile or the Etosha pan, 120 km) that are
comparable in scale with Ontario Lacus, we suggest here
that many of the same processes and landforms are particularly
accessible to most northern hemisphere planetary scientists at the
smaller Racetrack Playa in Death Valley National Park, California.
2. Morphology and topography
Racetrack is a 4  2.5 km2 playa that is flooded for perhaps a
few days a year—see Lorenz et al. (2009b). The playa is somewhat
famous for its ‘sliding rocks’—cobbles and boulders that are
apparently moved across the playa by wind when the playa is wet,
leaving a trail in the soft playa mud (e.g. Kirk, 1952; Schumm,
1956; Sharp and Carey, 1976; Reid et al., 1995; Messina and Stoffer,
2000).
Despite the difference in scale, it is intriguing that there is a
remarkable similarity in the planform of Racetrack and Ontario
(Fig. 1). That planform in the case of Racetrack is evidently the
result of the surrounding mountains and the superposition of
several alluvial fans onto the playa. It is not yet possible, due
to the resolution of the images (several km, Turtle et al., 2009), to
determine whether a similar situation prevails at Ontario.
The Racetrack Playa can be completely flooded (see Section 3)
by a single rainstorm, since the difference in elevation between
one end of the playa and the other (4 km) is only 5–10 cm
(Stanley, 1955). This yields a slope of only 2  105 radians
(or 0.001 degree). In fact, even though Ontario Lacus is larger by
a factor of 50, it is also flat-altimetry data (Lorenz et al., 2009a)
suggests that over a 100 km transect, the elevation difference is
at most 10 m, or a slope of 1 104 radians (0.005 degree). This
slope should be considered in the context of the once-per-Titan
day (15.945 earth days) tilt in local vertical of about 1 105
radians, due to the Saturn’s gravitational tide. Put another way,
tides may cause a 1 m height variation across the lake during a
Titan day, which could correspond to a horizontal movement
of the liquid edge by several km. Such a movement might
be detectable by remote observation by Cassini (this prospect was
considered by Lorenz (1994), but considering tidal flats with
slopes of 0.001 radians and thus a small (o1 km intertidal
range)—playa lakebeds and Ontario turn out to be considerably
flatter and the corresponding intertidal range wider, perhaps
observably so).
3. Precipitation and evaporation
It is often noted that liquid water is ‘unstable’ on the surface
of Mars. In fact, it is only metastable on the majority of the surface
of the Earth! The coexistence of liquid bodies on Earth with an
atmospheric humidity that is typically only 50–70%, attests to the
importance of disequilibrium. The metastability of surface liquid
is particularly evident in dry air near 301 latitude on Earth, where
most terrestrial deserts, and Death Valley, are found. A shallow
lake can evaporate completely in only a matter of days, and in so
doing can be cooled relative to the air above it. (The significance of
disequilibrium and evaporative heat flux in arid regions has been
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noted by the first author—the principal determinant of whether
the University of Arizona’s outdoor swimming pool felt cold on
a given day in that dry, evaporative environment was whether it
was windy the previous day: typical expressions for evaporative
flux from exposed liquids have a dependence on wind speed
raised to a power of between 0.75 and 1).
The disequilibrium problem has only been significantly
addressed for Titan by a single paper (Mitri et al., 2007) which
showed how evaporation – estimated from conventional Penman-
type flux relations (i.e. flux proportional to vapor pressure
difference) adapted from Earth – can cool Titan lakes by several
degrees relative to the atmosphere immediately above. This
cooling may indicate that the equilibrium assumption often used
in global climate models (e.g. Rannou et al., 2006) may be
incorrect.
The coupling between air temperature and water temperature
can be highly variable over the seasons—a terrestrial example is
the variation seen in Canadian lakes (e.g. Bussieres and Granger,
2007). An interesting paradox in the present-day terrestrial
climate is that pan evaporation is higher in winter than in the
summer (e.g. Ohmura and Wild, 2002). Evidently, radiative heat
flux and air temperature are not the controlling factors in
evaporation on Earth, but rather the gustier winds and drier air
in winter predominate (for the effects of wind on water loss from
playa lakes see e.g. Torgersen, 1984). A complicating factor in
saline playa lakes is that the high salt content may reduce the
water vapor pressure above it below the saturation value—the
relatively involatile solute ethane may similarly retard evapora-
tion of methane in the Titan’s lakes.
If Ontario is predominantly filled with (relatively involatile)
ethane, it may not change at all on observable timescales. On the
other hand, seasonal and secular change on observable (years)
timescales may occur if methane makes up much of the liquid. On
a global average basis, methane precipitation on Titan must be
limited over the long term to 1–2 cm per Earth year, simply
because the energy per unit area required to re-evaporate that
amount of rainfall would require all the solar heating available for
convection (Lorenz, 2000). However, this large-scale average may
be exceeded at some latitudes at the expense of others (e.g.
Rannou et al., 2006, predict as much as 1 m/yr at high latitudes).
Nonetheless, fluvial channels have been observed at all latitudes,
suggesting that while precipitation may be favoured at high
latitudes, in particular, (where rapidly—evolving clouds have been
observed in summer, e.g. Brown et al., 2002) it has rained,
sometime, everywhere.
Models show that individual rainstorms on Titan can dump up
to a few meters of rainfall in a single event (e.g. Hueso and
Sánchez-Lavega, 2006), but clearly the energy limit above requires
that century-long droughts must be interspersed among these
rare but heavy downpours. Mitri et al. (2007) have calculated local
evaporation rates for methane lakes on Titan, and determine
values of the order of 1–10 m/yr, depending on wind speed
(0.1–1 m/s). Thus a likely scenario appears to be occasional
rainstorms that flood terrain to some meters or tens of meters
of depth (depending on the size of the watershed feeding basins),
and then progressive drying-out over some years or decades. If
rainfall over the watersheds of Titan lakes like Ontario occurs each
year, it may be that the lake is flooded for part of the year before
drying up. On the other hand, if rain is more sporadic, the lake
may be flooded for a few years or decades, then the lake floor may
remain dry for decades or centuries.
This closely parallels the situation at the Racetrack Playa, albeit
with very different spatial and temporal scales. The climate of
Death Valley as a whole is reviewed in Roof and Callagan (2003).
Annual rainfall in the region is typically about 15 cm per year, of
which several centimetres may fall in a single storm. Conditions in
the region are such as to cause several centimetres of evaporation
per day, such that when a rainstorm occurs, dumping the 10 cm
of liquid needed to completely flood the playa, it evaporates
within a few days. We have documented one such event (Lorenz
et al., 2009a, b) with in-situ instrumentation.
The very shallow topography on the playa bed means that
progressive drying does not necessarily lead to a shrinking of the
flooded part towards the center, but rather some small regional
tilt, accumulation of sediments, and/or wind stress pushes the
liquid to one edge (e.g. Figs. 4 and 5). In addition, giant dessication
polygons may cause regular patterns of wetter and dryer lakebed.
Also, on the Racetrack Playa there are a couple of sites where
shallow gullying has occurred, where springs breach the playa
surface and causing surface irregularities (e.g. Messina, 1998).
An intriguing phenomenon was observed on a visit to nearby
the Bonnie Claire Playa. During a visit in December 2008, about a
week after a regional rainstorm, a thin strip of the playa was still
flooded. At the edge of this narrow pond, regularly-spaced shallow
drainage channels formed (Figs. 5 and 6).
Thus, regularly-spaced channels may arise from spatial varia-
tion inherent in landscape processes, without being ‘triggered’ by
localized sources such as springs or the mouth of external rivers.
In other words, surface heterogeneity and resultant remarkably
regularly-spaced landforms can be emergent, an example of
spontaneous pattern formation, as is often observed in other
physical systems. The radar reflectivity of the eastern part of
Ontario Lacus displays strong variability, yet its elevation remains
constant (to 10 m) over some 200 km. One possible cause for
the variability is the presence of channels like those shown here.
We make a final remark about the playa texture as it relates to
Titan remote sensing. In addition to or instead of large-scale
dessication features, small dessication polygons (2–10 cm?) can
form as the playa mud dries out. These are particularly prominent
and regular at the Racetrack and Bonnie Claire (see Figs. 7 and 8).
Not enough is known about Titan surface materials to guess
whether analogous features might form, but it is worth noting
that these features are at the scale of a radar wavelength
(the Cassini radar operates at Ku band, with a wavelength of
2.2 cm), and thus may affect (increase) quite profoundly the radar
backscatter of the dry playa surface. Archer and Wadge (1998) and
Wadge and Archer (2003) discuss the monitoring by radar
imaging at C-band (5.7 cm wavelength) of the Chott el Djerid
playa in Tunisia, and note a roughly logarithmic dependence of the
backscatter on the surface roughness, with backscatter at 20–261
incidence of 5 to 10 dB for saline pan with root-mean-square
roughness of 44 mm, compared with backscatter of o25 to
10 dB for dry mudflats with surface height variation of o2 mm.
4. Wind ‘set-up’
Wind interacts with surface materials in a variety of ways.
The most familiar products of this interaction on Earth are ocean
waves and sand dunes. To date, liquid surfaces on Titan show
every indication (e.g. Stofan et al., 2007; Brown et al., 2008) of
being very smooth, without any report of corrugation by wind-
generated waves. Lorenz et al. (2005) noted that the parameters
for wind generation (gravity, surface tension, and viscosity, as well
as the densities of both atmosphere and liquid) are all different,
making problematic the scaling of what are often rather empirical
terrestrial wind–wave relationships. Thus, it is not yet possible to
interpret the apparent absence of waves so far observed, into a
limit on near-surface wind speeds.
A somewhat less familiar effect of wind stress on lakes is the
so-called ‘wind set-up’. Considering this to first order as a static
equilibrium, the wind stress can be thought of as being balanced
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Fig. 4. The Racetrack Playa on December 4, 2008, about one 1 week after a regional rainstorm. Image is looking northwest across the playa, of which a 200 m wide strip at
the edge is flooded. In the absence of wind-driven waves, the transient lake surface is a near-perfect mirror. Photo by Ralph Lorenz.

Fig. 5. Transient lake at the edge of the Bonnie Claire Playa, December 2008. The lake is about 15 m wide and over 100 m long. Note that the lake is at the edge of the playa
(as for Racetrack Playa in Fig. 4), and thus with a steep slope at the left (north) and a very shallow one in the lakebed at right. The lake surface beyond about 1 m from the
edge is rippled by the capillary waves (wind was coming towards the camera). Note the regularly-spaced channels at the right.

by a slight gradient in the surface height of the liquid. The classic
paper on wind stress on lakes is that of Van Dorn (1953), who set
up some instrumentation around an 800-ft model-yacht pond and
measured the level changes corresponding to different winds. In
practice, of course, a steady wind transfers some momentum into
the liquid, and a circulation pattern develops in the lake itself.
Bennett (1974) describes, with both a linear analytical and a
numerical model how wind across a lake surface (nominally Lake
Ontario, Earth!) will develop a longshore current in the shallow
margins of the lake, while the return flow takes place in the
deeper parts of the center of the lake.
In an arbitrarily shallow lake (such as a flooded playa), the
effects of wind stress may be profound. It is known anecdotally
that when the Racetrack Playa is incompletely filled with water,
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Fig. 6. View from uphill on the Bonny Claire Playa (i.e. looking from the left of Fig. 5 to its right) to highlight the regular spacing and size of the drainage channels.

Fig. 7. A rock (20 cm at its base) on the Racetrack Playa, with a trail behind. Note fractures in the rock, the flat floor of the trail and ramparts to either side, and slight
disturbance in front of the rock. The playa has a very regular pattern of 3 cm dessication cracks.

the ‘puddle’ can be blown around at some speed by the wind from
one end of the playa to the other.
As a result of the smoothness of the playa’s surface, the
aerodynamic boundary layer above a playa may be very thin, and
a puddle in the center of the playa may experience unusually
strong winds. Measurements of near-surface wind profiles have
been made at other playa locations : (Lorenz et al., 2006) used fits
of a three-anemometer array to determine an aerodynamic
roughness length of 5 mm at the Willcox Playa in Arizona, and
(Bacon et al., 1996) report an even smaller value (0.1 mm) for the
Owens dry lake. With such low roughness lengths (and we expect
similar values for the Racetrack Playa), the wind speed 10 cm
above the surface is only reduced by 10–50% of the value at a
typical anemometer height.
The combination of atmospheric and gravitational parameters
on Titan (see Section 5) are such that wind stress effects on
puddles may be very significant on Titan, although such effects
have not yet been observed. Nonetheless, the Racetrack and
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Fig. 8. Rock Trail at the Bonnie Claire Playa, near the road looking West. Note that a
10-m-wide border of pebbles on the playa exists at this edge, suggesting that
small rocks are systematically transported towards this edge.
Bonnie Claire make useful pedagogical sites to stimulate discus-
sion about wind stress effects.
5. Rock transport at racetrack and on Titan
The most famous features of the Racetrack Playa are the
rocks upon it and the evidence that they occasionally move, a
phenomenon that seems improbable given familiar experience.
We note that the trails of moving rocks can be seen, somewhat
more conveniently albeit less spectacularly, at the Bonnie Claire
Playa in Nevada, just outside the Death Valley National Park. Such
trails were documented at the Bonnie Claire after a rainstorm by
Clements (1952).
Two features of the Titan environment that have major effects
on transport processes are its high atmospheric density ra and
low gravity g. A further factor is the lower density r of likely
crustal materials (organics and ice, with a density of 1000 kg/m3
as against typical terrestrial rocks of 2700 kg/m3).
If we assume the resistance to motion of a rock is from static
friction (i.e. ignoring dynamic effects and adhesion of mud etc.),
with a coefficient of friction m, and assume a roughly cubic rock
shape, then the resistance force R to be overcome is R ¼ Mgm, with
Mrd3.
The aerodynamic drag on a body in the boundary layer is
potentially complex to model accurately, but a free-stream drag
can be considered for the purpose of exposition. At the relevant
Reynolds numbers, a drag coefficient Cd of 0.5 can be assumed.
The drag D ¼ 0.5Cdd2 raV2, where V is the wind speed. At the
threshold of motion, D ¼ R, or V ¼ (2rdgm/Cdra)0.5. Thus, since the
surface gravity on Titan is lower by a factor of 7, the atmospheric
density higher by a factor 4, and the rock density lower by a factor
729
of 3, the threshold wind speed for a given rock size d is lower on
Titan than Earth by a factor of (4  7  3)0.5 ¼ 9. For a 10 cm rock,
the corresponding threshold wind speeds are 51 and 5.4 m/s on
Earth and Titan, respectively. It is, however, impossible to say how
frequently such winds might be encountered on Titan—indeed the
statistics of extreme winds are not well-known at the Racetrack
Playa as yet. Winds measured by the Huygens probe near the
Titan’s surface at low latitudes were only 0.3 m/s (Bird et al.,
2005). In addition, the global presence of dunes on Titan suggests
that particle-lofting winds of 1 m/s operate as long as the dunes
are active (Lorenz et al. 2006).
One factor that has been suggested (e.g. Reid et al., 1995) to
reduce the wind speed needed to push rocks across the playa is
the formation of an ice ‘sail’ around a rock, to increase its effective
drag area. There remains debate as to whether such ice is
absolutely required to enable rock motion, but it clearly can
facilitate it. While famous for its high temperatures, the dry air in
the Death Valley can allow temperatures to drop significantly
during winter nights, and in-situ measurements (Lorenz et al.,
2009b) show that at the Racetrack Playa (at an elevation of
1300 m) the temperatures can drop below freezing for some 50
nights in a year. The closed basin surrounded by mountains likely
acts as a sump for cold air (as observed elsewhere, e.g. Clements
et al., 2003), and blocks direct sunlight when the sun is low in
the southern sky in winter. Thus, freezing of water surfaces can
readily occur during winter.
Mitri et al. (2007) and Tokano (2009) have noted that freezing
due to evaporative cooling could occur in methane lakes on Titan.
However, this process cannot enhance rock transport in the same
way as on Earth, since unlike water, with its exceptional proper-
ties, methane is more dense in the solid form than the liquid.
Thus, methane ice sinks as it forms and so ice sails at the surface
of the liquid are unlikely to form around partly-submerged rocks.
Since the conditions for rock transport at the Racetrack are not
known, it is difficult to make a confident assessment whether
analogous processes are significant or even possible on Titan.
Nonetheless, the striking rocks and trails at the Racetrack may
make a useful feature to stimulate pedagogical discussion on
comparative planetary environments, and the physics of transport
processes.
6. Conclusions
No terrestrial location can be a complete analog for Titan, given
that conditions and working materials are so different on that
remote world. However, many terrestrial lakes and ephemeral
playa lakes have useful similarities with conditions believed to
pertain to some of the Titan’s lakes. In particular, the timescales
for fill and evaporation for playa lakes are short compared with
other competing geomorphological processes, a condition that
may prevail at at least some lakes on Titan, like Ontario Lacus. In
this regard, the Racetrack Playa in Death Valley National Park is a
compelling analog site in its shape, topography, and processes; it
is furthermore reasonably well-documented in the literature
owing to the exotic rock transport processes, and is comparatively
accessible for field visits.
Acknowledgements
RL acknowledges the partial support of the Cassini program.
Field test of meteorological instrumentation at the playa has been
supported by the NASA Applied Information Systems Research
program and the assistance of David Ek, Wilderness Resources
Coordinator at Death Valley National Park in conducting those
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730 R.D. Lorenz et al. / Planetary and Space Science 58 (2010) 724–731
in-situ measurements is acknowledged. BJK acknowledges a
research grant from the Geological Society of America,
and discretionary support from the Director of the Lunar and
Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona. We acknowledge the
Cassini RADAR team whose efforts yielded the altimetric profile
shown in Fig. 2. We thank Jason Barnes for assistance in the field,
and for useful comments on a draft of this paper. Referees
Stephane Le Mouélic and Jani Radebaugh are thanked for useful
comments.
Appendix: A note on science at the playa
The Racetrack Playa is a site of outstanding natural beauty and
a famous tourist attraction. Scientific study beyond mere inspec-
tion (e.g. involving set up of equipment etc.) requires a special
permit from the Parks Service—an effort that may take many
months. Camping on or near the playa, which is a formal
Wilderness Area, is prohibited. Driving on the playa is prohibited.
Manipulation or marking of the rocks, acquiring samples, leaving
marker stakes in the playa (as done by Sharp in a more permissive
era in 1976) is also prohibited. If the playa is wet, it should not be
walked upon as the resultant footprints will last for years.
The playa is reached by a 25 mile road, conditions on which
can be very variable. (Part is dirt, but part is rocky—when the road
has been recently graded a regular passenger car can make it with
care, but high clearance is strongly recommended. Even so, in 5
visits with 6, 2, 1, 1, 1 vehicles, respectively, the road toll has been
2 flat tires, 2 shock absorbers and one vehicle engine failure). Note
that there is no cellphone signal, except bizarrely at Teakettle
Junction. The road may be closed due to bad weather in winter.
The nearest accommodations are at Stovepipe Wells and
Furnace Creek, or further away but more affordably, Beatty, NV.
Beatty, NV is also relatively convenient for access to the Bonnie
Claire Playa. This playa can be easily driven to, since it abuts
Nevada State Route 267, and is not subject to National Park Service
regulations, as many tiremarks attest. Death Valley National
Park is reachable in a day’s drive from Los Angeles, although is
only 3 h from Las Vegas, which also has many domestic and
international flights.
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