Zabriskie Point: The Borax Man, the Film, and the View
California
The badlands spread out below Zabriskie Point in colors that change by the hour. At dawn they are pale gold. At midday, washed out, almost white. In the late afternoon, as the sun drops behind the Panamint Range, they go ochre, then rust, then a deep amber that makes the eroded mudstone look lit from within.
Christian Zabriskie was the vice president and general manager of the Pacific Coast Borax Company in the early twentieth century, a practical man who managed logistics in a brutal landscape. He is the reason this viewpoint has a name. He did not build it, he did not commission it, he did not write anything that has survived about what he thought of the view. His name is here because the borax company named things after its managers, and his name stuck.
In nineteen seventy, the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni chose Zabriskie Point as the centerpiece of a film he was making about American counterculture. The film is called Zabriskie Point. Antonioni had a large budget and high ambitions. He filmed extended sequences among the eroded hills, including a scene of remarkable physicality. American critics largely disliked the film, finding it a European director's portrait of American alienation that never quite found its subject. It became a cult object anyway, watched now more for the landscape footage than for the counterculture arguments it was trying to make.
The mudstone formations here are the remains of an ancient lake bed. Millions of years of sediment, compressed and tilted by the fault systems that built Death Valley, then eroded by rain and wind into the irregular ridges and gullies you see. The colors come from varying mineral content, iron oxides in different concentrations producing the spectrum from cream to rust.
Zabriskie Point is the most visited overlook in Death Valley. The sunrise crowd arrives before five in the morning. The view is real regardless of who is watching it, regardless of what anyone has named it, regardless of what a borax company superintendent did or did not understand about where he worked.
