Racetrack Playa, USA

This morning we were on our way to Death Valley before the sun rose.  We were early to try and avoid the heat of the midday sun.  Death Valley is the hottest and driest place in the USA, so it was a good idea to avoid the sun at its hottest.  I actually went to Racetrack Playa, which is in the Death Valley National Park, in California, in the USA.  Racetrack Playa is a dry lakebed in an endorheic basin which means it is surrounded by gigantic mountains, and when it rains there are no rivers for the water to escape, so it collects in the lakebed.  The reason Racetrack Playa is so fantastic, is because loads of enormous rocks move by themselves!  That's right, they move by themselves and the only theory scientists have is that the lakebed gets wet from rainfall and turns to wet, slippery clay, which the 90mph wind is able to blow the rocks over the smooth surface.

We saw these huge tracks, 8-30 cm wide, 2-3 cm deep and hundreds of metres long behind massive 320 kg rocks that are made of dolomite, which is a type of stone that comes from cliffs to the south of the lakebed.  The mystery of the rocks is that no-one has actually witnessed them move before and sadly today we didn't either.

It was an awesome place, but hard to manage there for very long because of the searing heat and dry atmosphere.  Now I'm really curious to find out how the rocks actually move, I hope the answer is discovered in the near future!