Abbey Fest II was located in Death Valley, Nevada during November of 1998. Here are some pictures, again, along with some quotes from Abbey's travels in Death Valley.
"The glare is stunning. Yet also exciting, even exhilarating --- a world
of light. The air seems not clear like glass but colored, a transparent, tinted
medium, golden toward the sun, smoke-blue in the shadows. The colors come, it
appears, not simply from the background, but are actually present in the air itself --- a
vigintillion microscopic particles of dust reflecting the sky, the sand, the iron
hills." Edward Abbey, "Death Valley", The Journey Home
"A Hard place to love, Death Valley. An ugly place, bitter as alkali and
rough, harsh, unyielding as iron. Here they separate the desert rats from the mice,
the hard-rock prospectors from the mere rock hounds." Edward Abbey, "Death
Valley", The Journey Home
"But the first impression remains a just one. Despite variety, most of
the surface of Death Valley is dead. Dead, dead, deathly -- a land of jagged salt
pillars, crackling and tortured crusts of mud, sunburnt gravel bars the color of rust,
rocks and boulders of metallic blue naked even of lichen. Death Valley is Gravel
Gulch." Edward Abbey, "Death Valley", The Journey Home.
"Returning through twilight, I descend the narrow between flood-polished walls
of bluish andesite -- the stem of the wineglass. I walk down the center of an
amphitheaterof somber cliffs riddled with grottoes, huge eyesockets in a stony skull,
where bats hang upside down in the shadows waiting for night." Edward Abbey,
"Death Valley", The Journey Home
"...A weird glow pervades the air through which I walk; it vibrates on the
canyon walls, revealing to me all at once a vision of the earth's slow agony, the
convulsive grinding violence of a hundred thousand years. Of a million years, I
write metaphorically, out of necessity. And yet is seems impossible to believe that
these mountains, old as anything on the surface of the planet, do not partake in some dim
way of the sentience of living tissue." Edward Abbey, "Death Valley", The
Journey Home
"...And yet there is life out there, life of a sparse but varied
sort...." Edward Abbey, "Death Valley", The Journey Home