Episode 2

Nick travels from the golden dunes at the southern tip of Death Valley, through the barren salt flat of Badwater Basin to the best-preserved ghost town, Rhyolite, in the north, ending up at Death Valley Junction – for a night at the opera! One of Death Valley's most dangerous residents is the rattlesnake.

Nick meets Danielle Wall who makes her living by recovering unwanted snakes from houses and gardens. Rattlesnakes are common here and on average cause five deaths per year in the USA, so Nick is alarmed to discover that experts like Danni are opposed to removing captured snakes' venom. Nick hears how the Valley was named by a group of pioneers in 1849 who took an ill-fated shortcut through the Valley in search of the California gold fields. Getting lost, they took 18 weeks to walk through to the fertile plains beyond the Panamint Mountains and arrived, parched and starving. As they left, one of them looked back, saying, "Goodbye, Death Valley" and the name stuck.

Nick joins plant specialist Ian Torrence whose job is to remove invasive tamarisk plants which spread fast and drink up to 20 gallons of water a day, killing everything around them. To preserve the fragile ecology here, this work has to be done without vehicles, and hard at work, Nick is overcome with the scorching heat. Not all non-natives are enemies though: Nick visits a date farm, planted over 100 years ago when the government were looking for crops that would thrive here. So successful was this plan that 90% of the USA's dates are now grown in California. Fifty years after the Gold Rush pioneers got lost here, gold was actually discovered in the Valley. Nick visits the ghost town of Rhyolite which had a brief period of fame as a rich seam of gold was found in the hills surrounding it. Around 8000 people moved here, and banks, schools, a prison and a railway station sprung up – but within eight years the gold had run out and the miners moved on. Nick's final stop is at the Amargosa Opera House at Death Valley Junction. Here ballerina and artist Marta Becket created her own private theatre, painted from top to bottom in lavish style. She performed ballets and musical theatre here the next 50 years until she died in 2017 aged 92. The theatre remains a monument to her artistic expression.