Death Valley
California, USA · Furnace Creek · Badwater · the ghost towns
11 places pinned — click any one for its story.
The place
Death Valley is the largest national park in the Lower 48 and a land of superlatives — the lowest, hottest, and driest place in North America, where summer temperatures top 130°F and rain almost never falls. Below sea level salt flats give way to painted badlands, sculpted dunes, and 11,000-foot peaks in a single view.
But it's also human history written on the desert: the twenty-mule-team borax wagons that first made it famous, the gold-rush boomtowns like Rhyolite and Ballarat that flared and died within a decade, and the improbable folly of Scotty's Castle. We've come back again and again — for the ghost towns, the oases, and the sheer scale of the emptiest place around.
Places I visited
History & facts for each spot — with a “then & now” archival photo where one exists. Every one has its own page; open it for the full write-up and all the photos.
The lowest point in North America at 282 feet below sea level — a blinding white salt flat stretching for miles, cracked into hexagons, in the hottest, driest place on the continent.
Full history & photos →Archival photo: California - Death Valley - NARA - 23934261 — Wikimedia Commons
The iconic overlook above a maze of golden, wrinkled badlands — eroded lakebed sediments millions of years old, unforgettable at sunrise.
Full history & photos →A mile above the valley floor on the crest of the Black Mountains, looking straight down onto Badwater with the snow-capped Panamints beyond — the grand panorama of Death Valley.
Full history & photos →Archival photo: California - Death Valley - NARA - 23934283 — Wikimedia Commons
Rolling golden dunes rising from the desert floor near Stovepipe Wells — the most accessible dunes in the park, glowing at dawn and dusk.
Full history & photos →A hillside splashed with pastel greens, pinks, and purples — mineral deposits of oxidized metals painting the volcanic rock along Artist's Drive.
Full history & photos →A half-mile-wide volcanic explosion crater in the north of the park — a young 'maar' blasted out by steam only a couple thousand years ago.
Full history & photos →Archival photo: Ubehebe Crater wall and rim looking northeast with mountains in background. February 12, 1928. Photographed by Mat Roy Thompson. (3e778b85-8370-44de-8d17-5b53bfa84627) — Wikimedia Commons
A Death Valley gold-rush boomtown that exploded to ~5,000 people around 1905 and was all but abandoned by 1916 — now a striking ghost town of crumbling banks, a bottle house, and a train depot on the Nevada edge of the park.
Full history & photos →Archival photo: Rhyo500small — Wikimedia Commons
A supply town for the Panamint Valley mines, founded in 1897 and largely dead by 1917 — a handful of adobe ruins on the dry lakebed, once home to Charles Manson's crew and desert prospectors like 'Seldom Seen Slim.'
Full history & photos →Read more on Wikipedia →Archival photo: Ballarat 1942 — Wikimedia Commons
A historic desert oasis and stage stop marked by a stovepipe stuck in the sand at the only water for miles — beside the Mesquite Flat sand dunes, now a tiny village in the heart of the park.
Full history & photos →Read more on Wikipedia →Archival photo: Arrow weed at Stovepipe Wells with Don Curry, Park Naturalist, Death Valley National Park. (973f37990b4549b988ca7b479a3bc83d) — Wikimedia Commons
The green heart of Death Valley — spring-fed date palms and the 1927 Furnace Creek Inn, an improbable oasis in the hottest place on Earth, long the base for exploring the valley.
Full history & photos →Read more on Wikipedia →Archival photo: Looking west from Furnace Creek into Death Valley, Death Valley, Calif (NYPL b12647398-74441) — Wikimedia Commons
The 1880s works where borax was refined and hauled out by the famous twenty-mule teams on 165-mile trips across the desert — the operation that first made Death Valley famous.
Full history & photos →Archival photo: Borax Smith's mine at Borate or Harmony, California, ca.1890-1900 (CHS-1598) — Wikimedia Commons