Daniel Arnold

“Salt-walking below sea level on a hot day in Death Valley feels like wandering through a fever dream. The sun has incinerated the surface of this place—burned off the plants, boiled off the water, stripped it down until what’s left is an abstraction of a landscape. I was an ant on the bottom of a stone box: a floor of salt, two walls of rock, and a lid of hot, heavy sun. In a half hour, the near shore, where I had begun, fuzzed out, leaving only a line between white and brown an indeterminate distance away. The far shore looked the same, a distant line that could have been one, five, or fifteen miles off. I walked, but the horizon never budged. My eyes told me that I might as well be standing still.”
― Daniel Arnold, Salt to Summit: A Vagabond Journey from Death Valley to Mount Whitney