VALLEY OF LIFE; CONTRARY TO ITS UNSAVORY REPUTATION, DEATH VALLEY IS A VIBRANT AND FASCINATING PLACE LOTS OF LIFE IN DEATH VALLEY.

Byline: Eric Noland Travel Editor

DEATH VALLEY NATIONAL PARK - It's really a shame that some greedy, impatient greenhorns, having blundered into this place while looking for a shortcut to California's gold fields, saddled it with such a macabre name.

It was 150 years ago this month that a member of the Bennett-Arcan party, rescued after enduring weeks of miserable privation on the floor of the dry-lake basin, christened it Death Valley.

Even today, if you tell people you're headed to Joshua Tree or Anza-Borrego or some other spectacular desert locale in the West, they'll often smile, nod and say, ``Beautiful country.'' But if you tell them you're going to Death Valley, they're more likely to scrunch up their noses and say, ``No thanks. Never been there. Not in a hurry to see it.''

Which is a pity, because this vast national park on the California-Nevada border boasts some incredible features: sand dunes that undulate across the landscape for miles, a 1920s mansion steeped in frontier lore, the lowest point of elevation in the Western Hemisphere, curious rock formations that produce a mosaic of subtle hues - light lavender, gold, gray, salmon, mustard - with the changing sunlight, a volcanic crater nearly 500 feet deep ... and water.

Really. Lots of water. On the east side of the valley, it gushes forth from Travertine Spring, filling two swimming pools and irrigating an 18-hole golf course at the aptly named Furnace Creek Inn and Ranch complex. It flows out of the ground in Grapevine Canyon, nourishing Scotty's Castle, the mansion located there.

It percolates from springs on the west side of the valley. One of those water sources, in fact, sustained the exhausted men and women and sick young children of the Bennett-Arcan group while two ox-team drivers, William Lewis Manly and John Rogers, climbed out of the valley to the west, wandered to the area of present-day Saugus, and returned with provisions - and an idea of how to get out.

Today, in an era of paved roads, vehicle air conditioners, refrigerated transport - and the Auto Club - Death Valley is infinitely more hospitable, despite the morbidity that pervades its place names: Hells Gate, Funeral Mountains, Dante's View, Coffin Peak, Starvation Canyon.

Late winter is an optimal time to visit. Temperatures in January-February, for example, average 70 degrees in the daytime, 43 degrees at night - although legions of European visitors seem to prefer the depths of summer, so they can return home with tales of a genuine Old West experience, the mercury having routinely hit 120 degrees.

There are many remnants of Death Valley's colorful past, including ruins of borax-mining operations from the late 1880s. At Furnace Creek Ranch, a free museum chronicles this chapter of the region's history, describing how the mineral was hauled 165 miles to Mojave by 20-mule teams.

Death Valley's relative isolation holds many urbanites at bay. Once you've driven more than 180 miles north of Los Angeles on Highway 395, you've got another 100 miles of winding road through the Panamint Range to reach Furnace Creek, the park's social hub. From another direction, the crawl up from I-15 at Baker is 131 miles. From Las Vegas to the east, the drive is 135 miles.

Once you're on the valley floor, you'll find that exploration is no less convenient. This national park is nearly the size of Connecticut, and although most people don't bother with the dirt roads that snake into its remote reaches, Death Valley's most popular attractions still stretch over a substantial area. On a trip here in mid-October, we put 980 miles on the odometer in four days.

So it's a good idea to allow plenty of time for your excursion. There is so much to see and ponder, it's not a visit you'll want to rush.

In the northeast corner of the park is Scotty's Castle, which stands as kind of an elaborate monument to con artistry.

At about the turn of the century, Walter Scott, an adventurer who would acquire the nickname Death Valley Scotty, borrowed two Colorado gold nuggets from his wife and set about convincing various urban businessmen that they came from his secret gold mine in Death Valley. Investment money poured in, which he spent lavishly.

One investor, Albert Johnson, treasurer of a life insurance company in Chicago, grew curious and paid a visit to Death Valley. There was no mine to see (there never would be), but Johnson's chronically poor health improved in the dry desert climate, and he fell in love with the place.

Johnson, whose wife wasn't thrilled with life in a tent on their frequent visits, bankrolled the construction of an elaborate, Spanish-style vacation home in 1922 - which Scotty promptly moved into and passed off as his own (presumably built with gold-mine revenues).

Today, 50-minute tours of Scotty's Castle - as it came to be known - are conducted throughout each day ($8 for adults). It is fascinating to walk through the dark interiors, surveying heavy redwood timbers, red tiles with inlaid images of desert creatures, Shoshone and Paiute baskets. Guests used to gather by the fire in the great room to be regaled by Scotty's tall tales, sometimes with Johnson present, playing along.

Park ranger Cecilia Mitchell, who led the tour while attired in 1930s garb, pointed to the wall that once featured an indoor waterfall. She remarked on the steam-heat radiators, and the water wheel that provided electricity for the house. Water flows from the spring here at a prolific rate: 180 gallons a minute in the castle's heyday, she said.

``People think of the desert as this barren, lifeless, desolate land,'' Mitchell said later. ``It's not.''

Indeed, this desert, despite averaging less than two inches of rain annually, sustains life in many forms. After our visit to Scotty's Castle, while proceeding south through the park, we encountered a coyote in an area between Dry Bone Canyon and Mesquite Flat. It had long since lost any fear of man, and appeared as tame as a suburban pet as it approached to within a few feet. The coyote licked its chops a couple of times. This suggested one of two things: Either some idiot had tossed this creature a morsel from a picnic basket ... or the coyote had come to acquire a taste for tourists who appear debilitated by the heat and dryness of Death Valley.

It was time to move on. In the area of Stovepipe Wells, at about the midpoint of the park, is one of Death Valley's most mesmerizing attractions. It is a vast plain of sand dunes, the remnant of a 600-foot-deep lake that covered this desert floor in the Pleistocene Epoch.

A well-marked gravel road leads to a parking area at the dunes' eastern edge. Most visitors seem to wade into the dunes 100 feet or so, take a couple of pictures, and retreat to their cars. But this fishhook-shaped expanse covers 14 square miles.

Bring along hiking boots and plenty of water. You'll find that after even a short walk, human footprints disappear, replaced by numerous tracks of birds, reptiles and rodents. The great mounds of sand, randomly sculpted and precisely rippled by the wind, at times seem otherworldly.

There are many such natural wonders in Death Valley.

Zabriskie Point is another. It lies just a few miles from Furnace Creek, but to experience it at its best - dawn - you might have to set an alarm. As the sun begins to peek over the Funeral Mountains, the Panamints far across the valley are fired a rich red. As the sun climbs higher, light plays on the rumpled contours of the sandstone hills below the point, and shadows marble the folds of the rock. It's a dramatic sight, but in winter be sure to bring a coat.

Farther south in the park is Artists Palette, reached by a nine-mile, one-way road (RVs longer than 25 feet prohibited). Here, oxidation in the clay of the ancient lake bed has created giant splotches of color on a cliff face.

Another popular stop is the Devils Golf Course, where striations of salt and gravel from the former lake bottom, contorted into crystallized ridges and turrets by the force of wind and rain, have created some truly nasty lies.

But the real tourist draw in Death Valley is a mean salt plain with a sickly looking puddle. Badwater. The sign says the elevation is -282 feet, and tourists clamor to get their pictures taken next to it, but it is not to be believed. The lowest point in the Western Hemisphere is actually a few miles farther out on the plain, but this spot (279.8 feet below sea level) is as low as you can go without having to stray too far from your car.

Far up the rock face to the east is a white mark indicating sea level; that's where the sand castles would be if Santa Monica Beach could be magically moved here.

It was not far from here - directly across the salt flat, at the base of Telescope Peak - that Asahel Bennett and J.B. Arcan made camp by a spring with their wives and four ill children. By then, their only source of food was their slaughtered oxen.

Days earlier, in the Nevada desert to the east, Manly wrote, ``The four children were crying for water, but there was not a drop to give them ... The mothers were nearly crazy, for they expected the children to choke with thirst and die in their arms.

Their wagon train from the Midwest had reached Utah too late in 1849 - when it would have been risky to try to beat winter to the High Sierra passes. The wagon train guide wanted to lead the group to Los Angeles, roughly along what is now I-15, then head north to the gold fields.

But rumors of a pass through the mountains to the west proved too tantalizing, and a large group of travelers splintered off, staggered across the Mojave Desert and wandered into this strange, silent valley - only to encounter the broad, towering range of the Panamints as an unbroken obstacle blocking their path.

The travelers split into various groups to try to pick their way out, and although 14 members of this ill-fated wagon train detour eventually perished, most had reached the mountains, passes and desert to the west and southwest. Only one person died in Death Valley itself.

Today, it's impossible to breeze along Death Valley's smooth, well- marked asphalt roads, carrying Arrowhead water on ice in the trunk and a box of Wheat Thins on the console, and not think of those unfortunate souls who had been in such a rush to get to the gold diggings.

Pull to the side of the road late in the evening, wander out onto the desert floor, and listen. It's eerily still. Imagine a rickety cart holding your belongings, dragged by an emaciated ox, crunching over this craggy rock at a few miles a day, as you search desperately for signs of a spring along the walls of this natural caldron.

Manly's account of his party's eventual exit seems almost too eloquent to be anything but apocryphal. The travelers, he wrote, trudged to a ridge in the Panamint Range, reaching it at dawn. ``Just as we were ready to leave ... we took off our hats, and then overlooking the scene of so much trial, suffering and death, spoke the thought uppermost, saying, 'Goodbye, Death Valley.' ``

It was an unfair characterization, because the valley hadn't been unduly harsh to them - providing several sources of water, for example. But it stuck.

Misnamed then, misunderstood to this day, Death Valley never could shake its grim reputation.

IF YOU GO

--GETTING THERE: Furnace Creek, Death Valley's tourism hub, is about 280 miles northeast of Los Angeles via I-5 and Highways 14, 395 and 190. On an approach from the south, it is 131 miles from Baker via Highways 127 and 190.

--COSTS: The National Park entrance fee is $10 per vehicle, $5 for a motorcycle or bicycle.

--INFORMATION: The Park Service information number is [phone]. Web: www.nps.gov/deva.

CAPTION(S):

7 photos, box, map

Photo: (1 -- 4 -- color) Glimpses of Death Valley's majesty and colorful past can be found in all reaches of the vast national park. Unfortunate gold-seekers gave way to borax miners, and ruins of the operations are still evident, center. Clockwise from top left, Devils Golf Course presents a vast bed of crystalized salt deposits; Scotty's Castle is a quirky, 1920s mansion; Stovepipe Well once nourished desparate pioneers.

(1) Mark J. Terrill/Associated Press (Devils Golf Course)

(2-4) John McCoy/Staff Photographer

(5) The Sand Dunes are among Death Valley National Park's fascinating features. They stretch out for 14 square miles at the center of the park, and after only a short walk from the parking area, you're likely to find a trackless expanse.

Eric Noland/Travel Editor

(6 -- 7) Badwater, above, marks the lowest point of elevation in the Western Hemisphere - 282 feet below sea level. The Great Hall at Scotty's Castle, right, was the room in which Death Valley Scotty would regale visitors with tall tales 70 years ago. Scotty's Castle, a 1920s mansion that was built at a then-astronomical cost of $2.5 million, is open daily for tours.

Eric Noland/Travel Editor (Badwater)

John McCoy/Staff Photographer (The Great Hall)

Box: (1) IF YOU GO (see text)

Map: DEATH VALLEY NATIONAL PARK

Knight-Ridder Tribune Graphics Network