I stayed 30 miles away from the entrance to the National Park, at the Amargosa Hotel, built 100 years ago when Amargosa was a booming borax-mining town. Borax is mentioned everywhere in the history of the area, but it's never explained what it is. It's a salty mineral used for basically everything from cleaning products to makeup. There are also references to twenty mules in brand names, place names and so on. This was typically the number of animals mining teams would use to transport all that borax. Anyway, the town was soon abandoned after mining borax stopped being profitable. The hotel remained, though.

In the 1960s a New York actress called Marta Becket took over the attached theatre, meticulously refurbished it and performed in it until 2012 - when she was 87 years old. The Opera House built a bit of a cult following for the improbability of such a grand location in the middle of a desert ghost town, and theatre companies from all over make it a point to perform there to this day. Audiences tend to be daytrippers from Vegas, a couple of hours away by car, or visitors to the National Park.

As for Death Valley, I was expecting monotonous, monochromatic landscapes but as it turned out, I found it impossible to capture their vastness, variety and vibrancy on camera. While the lowest point in North America is in the National Park - Badwater Basin is all arid, flat and entirely covered in lumps of salt, -85m from sea level - the snowcapped Telescope Peak rises to 3366m only 24km away. Think about that, yeah?