Death Valley National Park
If ever a place has earned a reputation for brutal superlatives, surely it is Death Valley: the lowest, hottest, driest place in the United States. Still, the valley, which sprawls across more than 3.3 million acres in California and Nevada, is also a place of surprising tranquility and beauty.
Death Valley itself is nearly 140 miles long, framed to the west by the Panamint Mountains, their peaks more than 11,000 feet high, and to the east by the somewhat lower Black and Amargosa ranges. More than 80 miles of the valley's basin lies below sea level; aptly named Badwater, where bitter, saline pools simmer beneath the sun, has an altitude of -282 feet, the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere.
As for temperatures, Death Valley in summer is a natural oven. Daytime highs in July average more than 115°F, in the shade. The highest air temperature ever recorded in the United States, 134°F, occurred at Furnace Creek in 1913. Now surprisingly, most visitors come to the park in winter, when days stay in the comfortable 70s. Rain is rarely a concern; on average, only an inch and a half falls here annually, and in some years there is none at all.
Sculpted and rawboned, this rugged landscape traces its beginnings back to a time, more than 500 million years ago, when a shallow sea covered the region. Overtime, its silty bottom was transformed into layers of rock that buckled into mountains as the earth's vast crustal plates ground against each other. When the plates began to pull apart some 3 million years ago, great blocks of land shifted along fault lines, rising in some places, subsiding in others, lifting mountains like the Panamints higher, but also creating the trough that is Death Valley.
Moreover, volcanoes have boiled over many times in the past, painting the region with thick blankets of ash (the riotously colored badlands of Artist's Palette owe their hues to such deposits). Nor have such cataclysms ended. At Ubehebe in northern Death Valley, several clusters of craters, some half a mile across and 500 feet deep, mark the site of eruptions that took place just 3,000 years ago.
A world of unexpected life
On summer afternoons, little moves in Death Valley as the temperature inches steadily higher. Yet a remarkable array of living things has come to terms with the desert. Fleshy green pickleweed crowds the margins of Salt Creek and Badwater, growing in a medium so salty it would kill most other plants. Creosote bushes lard their tissues with a resinous sap that reduces evaporation and discourages nibbling by animals, while cacti store their meager ration of water inside their swollen spiny stems. In fact, thorns, bristles, and hairs are common on desert plants, both to ward off animals and to protect the leaves from the drying effects of wind and sun.
Other kinds of desert plants survive by cramming their lifetimes into a few short weeks. Waiting in the rocky, seemingly desolate soil are millions of seeds, shielded from the elements by tough, protective shells, biding their time, sometimes for years, for exactly the right combination of mild temperatures and sudden moisture. When Death Valley's hit-or-miss winter rains arrive, the seeds break their long dormancy and explode into growth, carpeting the desert with flowers in a kaleidoscope of colors.
In contrast to the arid lowlands, the mountains that rim Death Valley are much cooler and wetter, and so they harbor an even greater diversity of life. Starting at about 4,000 feet above sea level, the creosote bushes, mesquite, and desert hollies give way to sage, juniper, and pinyon pine; at about 8,500 feet, forests of mountain mahogany and juniper take over, sheltering mule deer and the mountain lions that hunt them. Higher still stand cold-tolerant bristle-cone pines, some of them thousands of years old, their branches sheared and contorted by wind.
Of Death Valley's natural inhabitants, perhaps none is more surprising than its fish, or as dependent on tiny, fragile bits of habitat. The endangered Devil's Hole pupfish, electric blue and barely an inch long, for instance, has the smallest natural range of any vertebrate in the world. The entire population, which numbers just a few hundred, is restricted to a shallow rock shelf along one side of Devil's Hole, a deep cavern flooded with 92°F water.
Wanderers and miners
People also have long inhabited Death Valley, Paleo-Indians during the Ice Age and, later, the ancestors of the Shoshone, who still live at Furnace Creek. Many of the whites who first passed this way came in search of riches, for despite its hardships, Death Valley offered chances for wealth as well. Its most famous resource, borax, set off a mining boom in the 1880s, which created an indelible image: the famous 20-mule team. Actually made up of 18 mules and two horses, the teams dragged massive wagons, each one laden with more than 36 tons of borax, on the arduous 165-mile trek from Furnace Creek to Mojave, a one-way journey of 10 to 12 days.
Gold and silver claims also attracted hordes of hopeful miners, spawning such short-lived towns as Ballarat, Skidoo, and Bullfrog. Panamint City, founded in 1873 and fed to be "the toughest, rawest, most hard-boiled little hell hole that ever passed for a civilized town" before a flash flood wiped it out in 1876.
The park's most famous landmark, though, is still standing. Scotty's Castle, a Moorish-inspired fantasy of turrets, battlements, and red-tile roofs in northern Death Valley, is a monument to the unlikely friendship between Albert Johnson, a Chicago millionaire, and a flamboyant miner named Walter Scott, "Death Valley Scotty", whose mine Johnson was underwriting. Although Johnson built the estate as a vacation home in the 1920s, Scott frequently passed it off as his own, supposedly built with riches culled from a secret mine. Today the castle is preserved in all its glory, silent but for the desert wind, moving across the land like a ghost.