Death Valley National Park

Entering Death Valley National Park at Towne Pass, State Highway 190 crests the rolling Panamint Range and descends into Emigrant Wash. Along the road is a sign: Death Valley National Park.

Park? Other four-letter words are more often associated with Death Valley: gold, mine, heat, lost, dead. And the four-letter words shouted by teamsters who drove the 20-mule team borax wagons need not be repeated.

Park? The Forty-niners, whose suffering gave the valley its name, would have howled at the notion. “Death Valley National Park” seems a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron of the great outdoors.

Visitors to Death Valley have long linked the Creator with the place—not as a heavenly spot, but as the closest place to Hell on earth. It’s been called the land God forgot, a land God made in anger.

Mountains stand naked, unadorned; the bitter waters of saline lakes evaporate into bizarre, razor-sharp crystal formations; jagged canyons jab deep into the earth. Ovenlike heat, frigid cold, and the driest air imaginable combine to make this one of the most inhospitable locations in the world.

In Death Valley, the forces of the earth are exposed to view with dramatic clarity: a sudden fault and a sink became a lake. The water evaporated, leaving behind borax and above all, fantastic scenery. Although Death Valley is called a valley, in actuality it is not. Valleys are carved by rivers. Death Valley is what geologists call a graben. Here a block of the earth’s crust has dropped down along fault lines in relation to its mountain walls.

At Racetrack Playa, a dry lake bed, visitors puzzle over rocks that weigh as much as one-quarter ton and move mysteriously across the mud floor, leaving trails as a record of their movement. Research suggests that a combination of powerful winds and rain may skid the rocks over slick clay.

Badwater, the lowest point in the western hemisphere at 282 feet below sea level, is also one of the hottest places in the world, with regularly scheduled summer temperatures of 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

Death Valley is raw, bare earth, the way it must have looked before life began. Just looking out on the landscape, it’s impossible to know that year—what century—it is.

Many of Death Valley’s topographical features may be associated with hellish images--Funeral Mountains, Furnace Creek, Dante’s View, Coffin Peak and Devil’s Golf Course--but the national park can be a place of serenity.

Despite the outward harshness of this land, when you get to know the valley, you see it in a different light. As naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch put it: “Hardship looks attractive, scarcity becomes desirable, starkness takes on an unexpected beauty.”

Park History

Today’s visitor to Death Valley drives in air-conditioned comfort, stays in comfortable hotel rooms or well-maintained campground, orders meals and provisions at park concessions, even quaffs a beer at the local saloon. He or she may take a swim in the Olympic-sized pool, tour a Moorish castle, shop for souvenirs, and enjoy the desert landscape while hiking along a nature trail with a park ranger.

It hasn’t always been so. Read more about Death Valley's History >>

Park Highlights

The Death Valley Visitor Center Museum offers well-done interpretive exhibits and an hourly slide program. Ask at the information desk for ranger-led nature walks and evening interpretive programs. Visitor Center hours are 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. all year.

Perhaps the most scenic entry to the park is via State Route 190, east from Highway 395 through Towne Pass. Another scenic drive to the park is by way of Highways 127 and 190 from Baker.

A good first stop after checking in at the main park visitor center in Furnace Creek is the Harmony Bopraz Works—a rock salt landscape as tortured as you’ll ever find. “White gold,” Death Valley prospectors called borax., and though it was not exactly a glamorous substance, it was a profitable one. From 1883 to 1888, more than 20 million pounds of borax were transported from the Harmony Borax Works. A short trail with interpretive sighs leads past the ruins of the old borax refinery and some outlying buildings.

Transport of the borax was the stuff of legends, too. The famous 20-mule teams hauled the huge loaded wagons 165 miles to the rail station at Mojave. (To learn more about this colorful era, visit the Borax Museum at Furnace Creek Ranch and the park visitor center, also located in Furnace Creek.)

Salt Creek is the home of the Salt Creek pupfish, found nowhere else on earth. The little fish, which has made some amazing adaptations to survive in this arid land, can be glimpsed from a wooden boardwalk nature trail. In spring, a million pupfish might be wriggling in the creek; by summer’s end, only a few thousand remain.

Before sunrise, photographers set up their tripods at Zabriskie Point and point their cameras at the pale mudstone hills of Golden Canyon and the great valley beyond. The panoramic view of Golden Canyon is magnificent, but don’t miss getting right into the canyon itself—only possible by hitting the trail.

Another grand park vista is seen at Dante’s View. From this 5,475-foot viewpoint in the Black Mountains, one can see the Funeral Mountains, Greenwater Valley, and the shimmering Death Valley floor backed by the high Panamint Mountains.

A 14-square-mile field of dunes and some bizarre geology are some of the attractions of a visit to the Stove Pipe Wells area. Death Valley’s dunes lie between Towne Pass on the west and Daylight Pass to the east; there’s quite a sand-laden draft between the passes. The sand dunes are actually tiny pieces of rock, most of them quartz fragments.

Those surreal corn stalks you see across Highway 190 from the dunes are actually clumps of arrowweed. The Devil’s Cornstalks are perched on wind- and water-eroded pedestals.

Mosaic Canyon, located near Stovepipe Wells, displays mosaics of water-polished white, gray and black rock. Nature has cemented the canyon’s stream gravels into mosaics large and small. It’s easy to imagine you’ve entered an art gallery when you view the mosaics on the canyon wells; not only are nature’s works of art on display, but the long, narrow, white marble walls of the canyon seem quite “gallery”-like.

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