"A lot of desert rats would claim the beauty of Death Valley is the lonesome, windswept plains of the floor, miles and miles across," says Jack Boucher of the Historic American Building Survey, National Park Service. Yet here sits splendor in his camera's crosshairs, in the cool remove of the folded and crumpled flanks that rise up on the northern rim of the country's hottest spot. It's a whole lot of somewhere, in the middle of nowhere.

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