Aside from the castle, the other major sight in that region was the Ubehebe Crater. This was one gigantic hole in the ground, and reminds me a lot of the Sarlacc Pit in Return of the Jedi. At first, I imagined this was caused by some ancient meteor bouncing off the Earth like a huge space-faring billiard ball. The information board at the site tells us otherwise, though. This in fact is what you get when you add magma to an underground lake. The immediate region all around the crater was covered with black ash and sand, very much like what you see on the beaches of Santorini, another volcanically active spot.

One place in the Valley that I really would have liked to visit was the Racetrack. This was accessible by a gravel road branching off from the paved one to the Ubehebe Crater. Since we didn’t want to subject Paul’s poor car to God knows how many miles of bumping around, we had to leave this out of our itinerary. Why am I so interested in this Racetrack place then? Because rocks move here, and nobody knows why. That’s right. They move, in strange unpredictable paths, leaving trails in the dried mud. Sometimes a few will move together, and sometimes one decides to simply take off on its own. And the mysterious thing is, no one has ever seen them move! How friggin’ cool is that? Next time I come, I’m renting a four wheel drive.