🇺🇸 United States · West Coast and California
Death Valley National Park is the land of extremes: the hottest, driest and lowest place in North America. This is where the highest officially recognized air temperature on Earth was recorded (56.7 °C, 134 °F, at Furnace Creek in 1913, a record some experts dispute), and in recent decades Furnace Creek has again come close to 54 °C (130 °F). Badwater Basin, meanwhile, sinks to 86 meters below sea level, the lowest point on the continent. It is also the largest national park in the contiguous United States, an immense desert of salt flats, dunes, canyons and mountains that looks like another planet.
Far from being a lifeless wasteland, Death Valley is a landscape of austere, dazzling beauty: the white salt expanses of Badwater, the golden dunes of Mesquite Flat, the incredible colors of Artists Palette, the viewpoints of Zabriskie Point and Dante's View, the sculpted canyons and, in rainy years, the rare and spectacular desert bloom (superbloom). Its dramatic name comes from a group of pioneers who nearly died crossing it during the gold rush.
This guide walks you through the essentials of Death Valley with a practical eye: which viewpoints and corners you cannot miss, how to organize the visit while avoiding the dangerous summer heat, what precautions to take (water, fuel, no walking in the heat of the day), the enormous distances between points, and where to sleep and eat in a park with very few services. Death Valley is usually combined with Las Vegas (the most common base) or with a road trip through the parks of the Southwest.
The valley was inhabited for centuries by the Timbisha Shoshone, who still have a recognized community inside the park and who called it Tümpisa. Its dramatic name was born in the winter of 1849-1850, when a group of pioneers looking for a shortcut to the California gold fields got trapped in the valley; on getting out after great hardship, one of them is said to have declared 'goodbye, Death Valley'. In the following decades there was mining, above all of borax, hauled out by the famous twenty-mule teams. In 1933 the National Monument was created and in 1994 it became a National Park. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The golden state of the Pacific: land of dozens of Native peoples and of the Franciscan missions, forged by the gold rush of 1849, today the largest economy in the United States and the cradle of Hollywood, Silicon Valley and legendary parks such as Yosemite and Sequoia.
Read the history of California →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The hottest, driest and lowest place in North America carries a name that sounds like a sentence: Death Valley. And yet it hides a paradox that sums up its whole history: while a group of gold rush pioneers was giving it that funereal name as they barely escaped in 1850, an entire people had been living there for thousands of years without calling it anything of the sort. Because, despite its reputation as an inhospitable land, Death Valley has been inhabited by human beings for millennia. Its historic dwellers are the Timbisha Shoshone, a people who called the valley Tümpisa, a reference to the red ochre paint they obtained in the area. Far from seeing the valley as a place of death, they considered it their home and developed a deep knowledge of the desert that allowed them to survive and thrive in one of the harshest environments on the planet.
Their way of life was seasonal and nomadic within their territory: in the hottest summer months they climbed to the high, cool zones of the surrounding mountains, and in winter they came down to the valley floor, beside the springs and oases such as the one at Furnace Creek. They made use of every available resource: they gathered pine nuts in the heights, mesquite and other plants in the valley, and hunted desert wildlife. Managing the water of the scarce springs was central to their survival.
The arrival of gold seekers and, later, of miners, marked the start of hard times for the Timbisha. Despite the pressure on their lands and resources, they managed to stay in the valley. With the creation of the park, their right to the land went unrecognized formally for a long time, until finally, well into the 21st century, they obtained recognition of a community and a territory of their own inside the park, where the Timbisha Shoshone Tribe still lives today.
The valley's dramatic name comes from an episode of the California gold rush. In the winter of 1849-1850, several groups of pioneers heading for the gold fields tried to take a shortcut off the main route to save time, pushing into this arid valley about which they knew almost nothing. What looked like a shortcut became a trap: they were stuck for weeks, with no idea how to get out of the basin ringed by mountains, suffering hunger, thirst and exhaustion.
After enormous hardship, and with the help of some young men in the group who scouted on foot in search of a way out and came back with supplies, most of them finally managed to escape the valley, although there were casualties. Tradition has it that, on getting out and looking back, one member of the group said goodbye with something like 'goodbye, Death Valley!', and so the place was named forever, with a name that exaggerates its real danger but captures the drama of that experience.
Ironically, almost none of those pioneers actually died in the valley, but the evocative name caught on immediately and helped build the region's reputation as a deadly place. That image, a mix of legend and the reality of extreme heat, would stay with Death Valley forever and become, over time, part of its appeal.
After the pioneers came the miners. Although gold and silver drew prospectors who founded short-lived mining towns in the region (some of which became ghost towns, like Rhyolite), the resource that really shaped the valley's economic history was borax, a mineral used in soaps, detergents and industrial processes. In the late 19th century borax was extracted from the valley's salt flats, above all around Harmony Borax Works, whose remains are still preserved near Furnace Creek.
The great challenge was hauling the borax from that remote, scorching corner to the nearest railway line, more than 270 kilometers away, across the desert. The solution became legendary: enormous wagons pulled by teams of twenty mules (the famous 'twenty-mule teams'), which dragged the mineral on exhausting journeys. The image of the twenty mules became a symbol of the West and a famous commercial brand, and is part of the imagery of Death Valley.
Mining left its mark on the landscape and the culture of the valley, with ghost towns, old facilities and roads that are tourist attractions today. When mining activity declined, the valley's extraordinary landscape began to be valued for its own sake, and the old mining and railway interests even drove tourism, building hotels such as the historic inn at Furnace Creek.
As the scenic value of Death Valley came to outweigh the mining one, interest in protecting it grew. In 1933, President Herbert Hoover proclaimed Death Valley National Monument, placing this vast desert territory under federal protection. During the Great Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps built roads, trails and infrastructure that opened the monument to tourism, and the extreme desert began to attract travelers fascinated by its unique landscapes.
For decades, the area held national monument status, which still allowed some mining activity within its boundaries. Finally, in 1994, with the passing of the California Desert Protection Act, the monument was raised to the category of Death Valley National Park and its boundaries were considerably expanded, making it the largest national park in the contiguous United States. That same law strengthened protection of the desert against mining and other uses.
Today, Death Valley combines its record-holding status —the hottest, driest and lowest place in North America— with that of a world-famous tourist destination, celebrated for its salt flats, dunes, viewpoints and night skies (it is also a recognized dark sky park). The continued presence of the Timbisha Shoshone Tribe is a reminder, moreover, that this desert of extremes was never really a place of death, but a home going back millennia.