The trees at Sossusvlei are about 900 years death. The wood almost feels like a soft kind of rock and here you actually can immagine how petrified wood origins. A vlei is a place in the dessert where now and then water does run (or used to run). In case of Sossusvlei, the water did run here on a yearly base during the rainstorms in the mountains that are situated about 50 kilometer to the East. Because of the, by wind caused, shifting dunes this 1 kilometer diameter "death Valley" was cut-off from the anual floodings leaving nothing more than death trees and a chalked surface. This was also one of the the film locations for the movie "the Cell". Jennifer Lopez was sitting on one of these treetrunks with her child!