47 Fun Facts About Death Valley National Park

Death Valley National Park straddles the border between which two states?

Most of it lies in California east of the Sierra Nevada; small parts spill over into Nevada.

Death Valley holds which trio of superlatives among US national parks?

Death Valley is the hottest, driest and lowest national park in the United States: summer highs regularly top 120 °F, some years bring no measurable rain, and Badwater Basin lies below sea level.

Badwater Basin, the lowest point in North America, lies how far below sea level?

Badwater Basin lies 282 feet (86 m) below sea level; in the Western Hemisphere only Argentina's Laguna del Carbón is lower, and Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the lower 48, is about 85 miles away.

What air temperature, recorded at Furnace Creek on 10 July 1913, is the highest ever measured on Earth?

Furnace Creek's 134 °F (56.7 °C) reading of 10 July 1913 is the World Meteorological Organization's recognised world record; a 136 °F claim from Libya in 1922 was struck off in 2012.

How much rain falls at Badwater in an average year?

Badwater averages only about 1.5 inches of rain a year, and some years record none at all; the surrounding mountains can receive over 15 inches, and rare storms send flash floods across the valley floor.

Why is Death Valley so dry?

The Sierra Nevada, Argus and Panamint ranges each force air upward, in what climatologists call a rain shadow.

What is the highest point in the park?

Telescope Peak in the Panamint Range is the park's summit, rising straight from the salt flats of Badwater about 15 miles away in one of the greatest vertical rises in the lower 48.

Which of the park's dune fields is the tallest in California, rising about 680 feet?

Eureka Dunes in remote Eureka Valley rise about 680 feet above the valley floor, the tallest dunes in California; sand sliding down their faces produces a booming 'singing' sound.

The lost 1849 party stumbled into the valley while looking for what?

Hoping for a shortcut to the California gold fields, about 100 wagons left the Old Spanish Trail in late 1849 on a rumoured cut-off; most soon turned back, but the Jayhawkers and Bennett-Arcane families pressed on into the valley.

Which Native people regained about 7,500 acres of their homeland under a 2000 act?

The Timbisha Shoshone, once called Panamint Shoshone, received about 7,500 acres under the Timbisha Shoshone Homeland Act of 2000, including a 314-acre village site at Furnace Creek where they had lived for centuries.

The borax refined at the Harmony Borax Works in the 1880s was mainly used to make what?

Borax from William Tell Coleman's Harmony works, which ran from about 1883 to 1888, went mainly into soap and other household and industrial products; it remained the valley's one consistently profitable mineral.

The 20-Mule Team Borax brand was used to promote which long-running radio and TV programme?

The 20 Mule Team Borax brand, created by Francis Marion Smith's company after it bought out Coleman in 1890, sponsored Death Valley Days on radio from 1930 and on television from 1952 to 1970.

Which president proclaimed Death Valley National Monument on 11 February 1933?

Herbert Hoover signed the proclamation on 11 February 1933, weeks before leaving office, setting aside almost two million acres; Congress reopened the monument to mining that June.

Which 1994 law expanded the monument by 1.3 million acres and made it a national park?

The California Desert Protection Act of 31 October 1994 added 1.3 million acres and redesignated the monument a national park; the 2019 Dingell Act later added a further 35,292 acres.

Roughly what share of the park is designated wilderness?

More than 93 percent of the park, over 3 million acres, is designated wilderness after the 1994 act and a 2019 addition; roads and developed areas such as Furnace Creek are carved out as corridors.

Scotty's Castle in Grapevine Canyon was actually built and paid for by whom?

'Death Valley Scotty' had conned Johnson into backing a fake gold mine; the two became friends and Johnson played along, calling himself Scott's banker.

Why was Scotty's Castle closed to the public from 2015 onward?

The October 2015 flood wrecked the site and the 2021 fire destroyed the historic garage used as a visitor center; the closure was planned to run through at least 2026.

The Racetrack Playa is famous for what?

In 2014 researchers watched thin sheets of melting ice, pushed by light winds, shove the stones along at up to 80 mm a second.

Ubehebe Crater in the north of the park was created by what kind of eruption?

Geologists call the resulting pits maars; the half-mile-wide crater is 500 to 777 feet deep and 2,000 to 7,000 years old.

Zabriskie Point is named after an executive of which business?

Christian Zabriskie was vice-president and general manager of Pacific Coast Borax; the golden badlands below the viewpoint are sediments of Furnace Creek Lake, which dried up about five million years ago.

Which Italian director's 1970 film is titled Zabriskie Point?

Michelangelo Antonioni shot his 1970 counterculture drama Zabriskie Point in Death Valley; its soundtrack includes Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia and the Rolling Stones.

George Lucas used parts of Death Valley in 1977 to stand in for which fictional planet?

Death Valley doubled for Tatooine, Luke Skywalker's home world, in the original 1977 Star Wars; pickup shots were filmed at spots including Golden Canyon and Desolation Canyon in January 1977.

Which president added Devils Hole, sole home of the Devils Hole pupfish, to the monument in 1952?

Harry Truman's January 1952 proclamation added the 40-acre Devils Hole tract, just over the Nevada line, to the monument to protect the pupfish; the pool's sunlit shelf is perhaps the smallest range of any vertebrate.

The Supreme Court case Cappaert v. United States established what about Devils Hole?

Nearby farm pumping in the 1960s and 70s had been dropping the water below the tiny shelf where the fish feed and spawn.

The Death Valley pupfish, a relic of wetter times, descends from fish that swam in from which river?

Ancestors of the Death Valley pupfish are thought to have entered from the Colorado River basin through a long-vanished chain of Ice Age rivers and lakes; today the species survives only in Salt Creek and Cottonball Marsh.

What name do geologists give the Ice Age body of water that once filled Death Valley?

Geologists call it Lake Manly, a terminal Ice Age lake up to 600 feet deep fed by the Amargosa, Mojave and Owens river systems; as it dried around 10,000 years ago it left behind the salt pans.

How large is the biggest salt pan in the park?

Badwater's salt pan covers about 200 square miles, running some 40 miles from the Ashford Mill site north to the Salt Creek Hills; its crust is mostly sodium chloride left by the evaporation of the Ice Age lake.

Which dune field, just east of Stovepipe Wells, is the easiest to reach from a paved road?

Mesquite Flat Dunes, mostly quartz sand, sit beside Highway 190 a couple of miles east of Stovepipe Wells with a car park at their edge; the park's other dune fields need long dirt-road drives.

Which gold-rush ghost town near Death Valley had a stock exchange, opera house and bottle house by 1907?

Rhyolite, near Beatty, Nevada, boomed from 1905 with a three-storey bank, a stock exchange, an opera house and Tom Kelly's house of some 50,000 bottles; its big mine closed in 1911 and the town was empty by 1920.

The Keane Wonder Mine gold strike of 1903 was made by an out-of-work Irish miner and whom?

Irishman Jack Keane and Domingo Etcharren, a one-eyed Basque butcher from Ballarat, were hunting silver in the Funeral Mountains in 1903 when they struck a ledge of free-milling gold by accident.

Which short-lived 1926 mining camp in Titus Canyon was a stock-promotion swindle?

Leadfield sprang up in Titus Canyon in 1926 after promoter C. C. Julian's advertisements showed steamships sailing up the Amargosa River to it; the lead ore proved worthless and the camp emptied within a year.

What did the CCC camp at Cow Creek briefly hold in 1942?

Sixty-six detainees were held there; the CCC had graded 500 miles of road and built 76 buildings during the Depression.

The last working mine in the park closed in which year?

The Billie borax mine near the old Ryan camp, the park's last working mine, closed in 2005; the 1976 Mining in the Parks Act had already banned new claims and open-pit mining after strip mines scarred the monument.

What was Furnace Creek called when the borax company founded it in 1883?

The borax company's ranch was christened Greenland Ranch for the green alfalfa fields it planted to feed the mule teams; the name changed to Furnace Creek Ranch in 1933.

Which viewpoint on the crest of the Black Mountains looks down on Badwater from about 5,476 feet?

Dante's View, at about 5,475 feet on the Black Mountains crest beside Coffin Peak, looks straight down on Badwater's salt flats; on a clear day both the lowest and highest points in the lower 48 are in sight.

How many plant species grow in the park, 23 of them found nowhere else?

More than 1,000 plant species grow in the park, from salt-tolerant pickleweed on the valley floor to conifers on the high ridges; endemics include the rock lady, and honey mesquite sends roots 50 feet down for groundwater.

How many bird species have been recorded in the park?

Some 307 bird species have been recorded, most of them migrants passing through oases such as Furnace Creek and Saratoga Spring; the park also counts 51 native mammals, 36 reptiles, three amphibians and two native fish.

Which of these trees grows in the park's higher zones?

Vegetation climbs from creosote and mesquite through Joshua tree and pinyon-juniper to limber and bristlecone pine woodland.

In which year did the International Dark-Sky Association designate Death Valley a dark sky park?

The International Dark-Sky Association certified Death Valley a Gold Tier Dark Sky Park in February 2013; its remoteness keeps the night sky dark even with Las Vegas only about 100 miles away.

The 'wine glass canyons' on the park's Black Mountains form because of what?

The V ends in a slot canyon halfway down, and the debris builds a small, steep alluvial fan; the Panamints opposite have huge fans by comparison.

What kind of landform is Death Valley itself, geologically?

Death Valley is a graben: a block of crust that dropped between roughly parallel faults as the Basin and Range province stretched; the oldest rocks exposed in the valley are about 1.7 billion years old.

What name does the park give the jagged field of salt-crystal spires south of Furnace Creek?

Devil's Golf Course is a bed of halite crystals weathered into jagged pinnacles; a 1934 park guidebook remarked that 'only the devil could play golf' on its surface, and the name stuck.

Which industrialist bought the Montgomery-Shoshone Mine in 1906 and gave Rhyolite electric lights and water mains?

Steel magnate Charles M. Schwab bought the mine in 1906 and financed piped water and electric lines for the town; an independent assessment in 1908 found the ore overvalued, the stock crashed and the mine shut in 1911.

Among national parks in the contiguous United States, how does Death Valley rank by area?

At some 3.4 million acres Death Valley is the largest national park in the contiguous United States, bigger than Rhode Island and Delaware together; only four Alaskan parks are larger.

How high is the summit of the Panamint Range, the park's highest point?

The Panamint summit stands 11,049 feet (3,368 m) above sea level; from the top both Badwater, the lowest point in North America, and Mount Whitney, the highest in the contiguous US, are in view.

In which year did UNESCO designate Death Valley part of a desert biosphere reserve?

UNESCO designated Death Valley part of a desert biosphere reserve in 1984, alongside Joshua Tree and Anza-Borrego, recognising the region's desert ecosystems for research and conservation.

What is the record low temperature ever measured in Death Valley?

The record low at Furnace Creek is 15 °F (−9 °C), set on 8 January 1913, the same year as the record high; winter nights on the valley floor dip below freezing only a handful of times a year.