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47 free Death Valley National Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Death Valley National Park trivia quiz covers the largest national park in the lower 48 and the hottest, driest and lowest of them all. Questions cover Badwater Basin at 282 feet below sea level, the 134 °F reading of 1913, the rain shadow that keeps it dry, Telescope Peak, the sailing stones of Racetrack Playa, Ubehebe Crater, Zabriskie Point, the dunes and the ancient Lake Manly. History runs from the Timbisha through the lost forty-niners who named the valley, the borax boom and its twenty-mule teams, Rhyolite and the Keane Wonder gold rush, Death Valley Scotty and his 'castle', Hoover's 1933 monument, the CCC camp that briefly held Japanese-American detainees, the 1994 California Desert Protection Act, Star Wars' Tatooine and the Supreme Court fight over the Devils Hole pupfish. Wildlife, plants and the park's dark skies round it out. Questions run from easy to expert with the difficulty shown on each one. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. If you enjoy this one, try our Yosemite and US National Parks quizzes next.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Death Valley National Park straddles the border between which two states?
California and Nevada
Most of it lies in California east of the Sierra Nevada; small parts spill over into Nevada.
Q 02Death Valley holds which trio of superlatives among US national parks?
Hottest, driest and lowest
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.
Q 03Badwater Basin, the lowest point in North America, lies how far below sea level?
282 feet
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.
Q 04What air temperature, recorded at Furnace Creek on 10 July 1913, is the highest ever measured on Earth?
134 °F
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.
Q 05How much rain falls at Badwater in an average year?
About 1.5 inches
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.
Q 06Why is Death Valley so dry?
Mountain ranges wring the moisture out of Pacific air
The Sierra Nevada, Argus and Panamint ranges each force air upward, in what climatologists call a rain shadow.
Q 07What is the highest point in the park?
Telescope Peak
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.
Q 08Which of the park's dune fields is the tallest in California, rising about 680 feet?
Eureka Dunes
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.
Q 09The lost 1849 party stumbled into the valley while looking for what?
A shortcut to the California gold fields
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.
Q 10Which Native people regained about 7,500 acres of their homeland under a 2000 act?
The Timbisha
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.
Q 11The borax refined at the Harmony Borax Works in the 1880s was mainly used to make what?
Soap and industrial products
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.
Q 12The 20-Mule Team Borax brand was used to promote which long-running radio and TV programme?
Death Valley Days
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.
Q 13Which president proclaimed Death Valley National Monument on 11 February 1933?
Q 21Which Italian director's 1970 film is titled Zabriskie Point?
Michelangelo Antonioni
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.
Q 22George Lucas used parts of Death Valley in 1977 to stand in for which fictional planet?
Tatooine
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.
Q 23Which president added Devils Hole, sole home of the Devils Hole pupfish, to the monument in 1952?
Harry Truman
Herbert Hoover
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.
Q 14Which 1994 law expanded the monument by 1.3 million acres and made it a national park?
California Desert Protection Act
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.
Q 15Roughly what share of the park is designated wilderness?
More than 93 percent
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.
Q 16Scotty's Castle in Grapevine Canyon was actually built and paid for by whom?
Chicago millionaire Albert Mussey Johnson
'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.
Q 17Why was Scotty's Castle closed to the public from 2015 onward?
Severe flood damage, then a 2021 fire
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.
Q 18The Racetrack Playa is famous for what?
Rocks that leave trails as they slide across it
In 2014 researchers watched thin sheets of melting ice, pushed by light winds, shove the stones along at up to 80 mm a second.
Q 19Ubehebe Crater in the north of the park was created by what kind of eruption?
A steam explosion when magma met groundwater
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.
Q 20Zabriskie Point is named after an executive of which business?
Pacific Coast Borax
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.
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.
Q 24The Supreme Court case Cappaert v. United States established what about Devils Hole?
Its 1952 protection implicitly reserved its groundwater
Nearby farm pumping in the 1960s and 70s had been dropping the water below the tiny shelf where the fish feed and spawn.
Q 25The Death Valley pupfish, a relic of wetter times, descends from fish that swam in from which river?
The Colorado
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.
Q 26What name do geologists give the Ice Age body of water that once filled Death Valley?
Lake Manly
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.
Q 27How large is the biggest salt pan in the park?
About 200 square miles
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.
Q 28Which dune field, just east of Stovepipe Wells, is the easiest to reach from a paved road?
Mesquite Flat
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.
Q 29Which gold-rush ghost town near Death Valley had a stock exchange, opera house and bottle house by 1907?
Rhyolite
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.
Q 30The Keane Wonder Mine gold strike of 1903 was made by an out-of-work Irish miner and whom?
A one-eyed Basque butcher
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.