Panamint Valley

Panamint Valley is a long basin in the northeastern Mojave Desert of eastern California, lying east of the Argus and Slate ranges and west of the Panamint Range. It is an endorheic basin whose drainage never reaches the ocean, with a central salt flat that can fill with a shallow, short-lived lake after rain; during the wetter Pleistocene it held Lake Panamint, which connected to Lake Manly in nearby Death Valley. The valley runs roughly 65 miles from the Panamint Dunes in the north to the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake in the south, and is more than 10 miles wide in places such as Hall Canyon. It contains the ghost town of Ballarat and the Panamint Springs Resort, the valley's only lodging and services, and Barker Ranch, at its southern end, was Charles Manson's final hideout.