A bighorn sheep standing watch atop painted cliffs, sunlight and shadow playing atop the salt and soda floor, a blue-gray cascade of gravel pouring down a gorge to a land below the level of the sea—these are a few of the many awesome scenes I’ll always remember from my hikes in Death Valley National Park.
Death Valley National Park? The Forty-niners, whose suffering gave the valley its name, would have howled at the notion. “Death Valley National Park” seems a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron of the great outdoors.
Park? Other four-letter words are more often associated with Death Valley: gold, mine, heat, lost, dead. And the four-letter words shouted by teamsters who drove the 20-mule team borax wagons across the valley floor need not be repeated.
Hike? Well, “hike” is a four-letter word not commonly associated with Death Valley. However, we who like to hike Death Valley intend to subvert the dominant paradigm and share the park’s many intriguing trails.
“Death Valley” got its name from hikers—albeit unhappy ones. Looking for a shortcut to the California gold country, two groups of travelers with covered wagons got lost in the valley for weeks in December of 1849. After slaughtering their oxen and burning the wood of their wagons to cook the meat, they finally located a pass and hiked out of the valley. One of the pioneer women is reported to have said, “Goodbye Death Valley!” and the name stuck.
In Death Valley, where the forces of the earth are exposed to view with dramatic clarity: a sudden fault and a sink became a lake. The water evaporated, leaving behind borax and above all, fantastic scenery. Although Death Valley is called a valley, in actuality it is not. Valleys are carved by rivers. Death Valley is what geologists call a graben. Here a block of the earth’s crust has dropped down along fault lines in relation to its mountain walls.
Death Graben National Park?
Nope. Just doesn’t have the right ring to it.
Many of Death Valley’s topographical features are associated with hellish images—Funeral Mountains, Furnace Creek, Dante’s View, Coffin Peak and Devil’s Golf Course—but the national park can be a place of great serenity for the hiker.
At 3.4 million acres, Death Valley is the largest national park outside of Alaska. The very notion of hiking Death Valley is a surprising one—even to some avid hikers. The desert that seems so huge when viewed from a car can seem even more intimidating on foot.
Compared to forest or mountain parks, Death Valley has a limited number of signed footpaths; nevertheless, hiking opportunities abound because roads (closed to vehicles), washes, and narrow canyons serve as excellent footpath substitutes.
The distances across Death Valley are enormous. If you only have one day, stick around the Furnace Creek Visitor Center. Take in Harmony Borax Works, Badwater, Dante’s View and hike the interpretive trail through Golden Canyon.
For the average hiker, there’s a week or two’s worth of hiking in the park, though you can get a fair sampling of this desert in three to four days. Although it’s tempting, don’t over-schedule. Death Valley is vast, with abundant sights to see and hikes to take.
To see as much of the park as possible, choose a different entrance and exit highway. Several routes lead into the park, all of which involve crossing one of the steep mountain ranges that isolate Death Valley from, well, everything. If you enter on Highway 127 through Death Valley Junction, exit on the scenic byway through the Panamint Valley. If you entered from the Panamint side, leave by following Badwater Road (Highway 178) south from Furnace Creek, across the Black Mountains and Greenwater Valley to intersect Highway 127 at Shoshone.
A particular highlight of hiking Death Valley is encountering the multitude of living things that have miraculously adapted to living in this land of little water, extreme heat and high winds. Two hundred species of birds are found in Death Valley. The brown whip-like stems of the creosote bush help shelter the movements of the kangaroo rat, desert tortoise and antelope ground squirrel. Night covers the movements of the bobcat, fox and coyote. Small bands of bighorn sheep roam remote slopes and peaks. Three species of desert pupfish, survivors from the Ice Age, are found in the valley’s saline creeks and pools.
In spring, even this most forbidding of deserts breaks into bloom. The deep blue pea-shaped flowers of the indigo bush brighten Daylight Pass. Lupine, paintbrush and Panamint daisies grow on the lower slopes of the Panamint Mountains while Mojave wildrose and mariposa lily dot the higher slopes.
In reality, Death Valley celebrates life. Despite the outward harshness of this land, when you take a hike and get to know the valley, you see it in a different light. As naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch put it: “Hardship looks attractive, scarcity becomes desirable, starkness takes on an unexpected beauty.”
Death Valley National Park Know Before You Go
Geography
Located east of the Sierra Nevada and occupying a transition zone between the Great Basin and Mojave deserts, the park protects a diverse desert environment of mountains, valleys, canyons, badlands, salt dunes and salt flats.
Death Valley National Park is the largest national park in the lower contiguous 48 states. Some 91 percent of the park is official wilderness area.
At 282 feet below sea level, Badwater Basin on Death Valley’s floor is the second-lowest point in the Western Hemisphere, and is located only 85 miles from Mt. Whitney (14,405 feet in elevation). This difference in elevation is the greatest elevation gradient in the contiguous United States. Highest peak in the park is 11,049-foot Telescope Peak at the top of the Panamint range.
Largely because of its lack of surface water and low relief, Death Valley is the hottest, driest place on the continent. The highest temperature in the world (134 °F) was recorded near Furnace Creek on July 10, 1913. Rainfall averages less than two inches a year and in some years no rain at all falls on Death Valley.
Natural History
Despite its bad rep as a desert wasteland, Death Valley is home and habitat for more than 1,000 species of plants and 440 species of animals that have adapted to extreme conditions. The park is an International Biosphere Reserve.
Only portions of the salt flats are devoid of plant life; the rest of the valley boasts at least some vegetation. More than two-dozen Death Valley plant species grow nowhere else on earth, including Death Valley sandpaper plant, Panamint locoweed, and napkin-ring buckwheat.
At lower elevations the dominant flora includes creosote bush and mesquite, plants that can extend their tap-root systems 50 feet to find groundwater. At higher elevations pinyon pine-juniper woodland thrive and limber pine and ancient bristlecone pine cling to life on the park’s highest slopes.
Wildlife includes coyotes, rabbits, chipmunks, squirrels, the desert shrew, plus several species of gophers, rats and mice. Bats roost in caves, crevices and mine tunnels. Burros, introduced in the 1880s, roam the Panamint and Owlshead Mountains, as do the native mule deer. Desert bighorn sheep can be sighted in remote canyons and gamboling over inaccessible ridges.
History
From as early at 7000 BC, Native American groups have lived in the region. About 1000 BC, the Timbisha (often referred to previously as the Shoshone) inhabited the area, migrating between the mountains in the summer and the valley in the winter. In 1849 a wagon train looking for a shortcut to California gave the valley its name, even though only one pioneer perished.
Many are the legends of Death Valley gold and silver mines, but the only truly profitable ore mined was borax, hauled out of the valley by the famed twenty-mule teams. Radio programs and films helped Death Valley capture popular attention, and tourism began in earnest in the 1920s and accelerated in the 1930s when Death Valley National Monument was established and Depression-era government workers built facilities and hundreds of miles of good roads. Death Valley was substantially expanded and upgraded to national park status in 1994.
For More Info
Death Valley National Park For camping, road and weather information call 760-786-3200 Furnace Creek Visitor Center & Museum, 15 miles inside the eastern park boundary on Calif. 190, offers interpretive exhibits and a new movie every half hour. Ask at the information desk for ranger-led nature walks and evening naturalist programs.
The park’s nine campgrounds are at elevations ranging from below sea level to 8,000 feet. Make reservations online or call 877-444-6777.
Death Valley Natural History Association supports preservation efforts, interpretative programs, and scientific research. The group operates three book/gift stores in the park.