🌡️ Death Valley: What You Will Find

At thirteen and a half thousand square kilometres, Death Valley is the largest national park in the United States outside Alaska — it is bigger than Montenegro. It is also the lowest, driest and hottest place in North America.

The name came from a party of prospectors who came through here in the winter of 1849 looking for a short cut to California. They were held up for months and got out. As they left, one of them is supposed to have turned round and said "goodbye, Death Valley". One person out of the whole party died in the process, which is rather few for such a dramatic name.

The Highest Temperature Ever Recorded

At Furnace Creek on 10 July 1913 a temperature of 56.7 °C was measured. It is the official world record and at the same time the most disputed number in meteorology; a good many climatologists consider it a measurement error. But nobody has ever formally struck it out, so it stands.

The indisputable records are brutal anyway: in July 2020 and again in 2021 it was 54.4 °C here, the highest reliably measured temperature on Earth. And in 1972 the ground surface was measured at 93.9 °C — a few degrees short of what water needs to boil.

In practice that means that in July and August nobody walks anywhere here between ten and six. The rangers repeat it to everybody, and every year somebody does not listen.

Badwater Basin

The lowest point in North America: 86 metres below sea level. It is a salt flat and you walk across it over hexagonal plates that crack underfoot like ice.

High on the rock wall above the car park is a sign reading "sea level". It is the most vivid thing in the whole park — it shows how much water would be above you if there were a sea here.

And from the same spot you can see Telescope Peak, a summit 3,368 metres high. The difference between the lowest and highest points of the park is therefore more than three and a half kilometres over a distance of a hundred and thirty.

The Stones That Walk

On the dried bed of Racetrack Playa lie boulders behind which trails hundreds of metres long are drawn in the mud. Some are straight, others turn. The stones weigh up to three hundred kilos and nobody has ever seen one move.

For a century it was explained by gales, by ice, by magnetism, by a prank and by extraterrestrials. It was solved only in 2014, when researchers left stones there fitted with GPS and a time-lapse camera.

The answer is unexpectedly gentle. In winter a few centimetres of water gather on the playa, freeze overnight into a thin sheet of ice, and in the morning the sun breaks the ice into large floes — and a light wind, five metres a second is enough, pushes those floes slowly along. The floes push the stones at a few metres a minute. It is so slow and so unobtrusive that you can look straight at it and not notice.

The Lake That Came Back

In August 2023 the remains of a hurricane crossed the park and more rain fell in one day than usually falls here in a year. The roads were closed for months.

In February and March 2024 a genuine lake then stood in Badwater Basin, about half a metre deep and several kilometres long. People kayaked on it at the lowest point on the continent. The last time anything like it happened there was 2005.

When there is enough water in spring as well, a superbloom follows: seeds that have waited in the soil for decades germinate all at once and the desert is yellow for a few weeks. The last big ones were in 2005 and 2016.

The Fish That Lives in One Hole

In a detached piece of the park is a limestone pit called Devils Hole, over a hundred and thirty metres deep. On its upper part, an area roughly the size of two dining tables, lives a pupfish found nowhere else in the world.

It is the vertebrate with the smallest natural range we know of. They are counted every year and there are usually between one and two hundred of them.

And About the Sky

Death Valley is in the highest category of dark-sky protection. The nearest large city is Las Vegas, two hundred kilometres away, and mountains shield it. The Milky Way casts a shadow here.

Film-makers know the place too: the desert scenes from the first Star Wars were shot here, including the canyon where Luke meets the Jawas.