Death Valley holds the highest air temperature ever officially recorded on Earth: 56.7 degrees Celsius, measured at Furnace Creek on 10 July 1913. This trough on the California–Nevada border is also the lowest and driest place in North America, sinking to 86 metres below sea level at Badwater Basin. It is a graben, a block of crust that dropped as the land was pulled apart from both sides, and rain almost never reaches its floor. The little water that runs off the surrounding mountains simply evaporates and leaves thick crusts of salt behind. Millions of years of sediment, mineral oxides and volcanic ash have turned the bare ground into an open museum of geology, protected today as the largest national park in the contiguous United States.
The power of the place lies in pure form and colour, laid bare where little life survives. At Badwater the drying salt cracks into hexagonal polygons that crunch underfoot and reach to the horizon. The dunes of Mesquite Flat glow at first light, while the eroded ridges of Zabriskie Point and the mineral-streaked slopes of Artist's Palette catch fire at sunrise and sunset. After dark, far from any city glow, this Gold-Tier dark-sky park fills with the Milky Way. Yet Death Valley is not always dry. In early 2024, after record storms, a shallow lake spread across Badwater deep enough to kayak for a few weeks, a brief return of the ancient Lake Manly that once filled the valley. Through it all it remains the ancestral home of the Timbisha Shoshone, who have lived here for more than a thousand years.