Death Valley National Park - California - Nevada

Established October 31, 1994

About 3.3 million acres

Our largest national park south of Alaska, Death Valley is known for extremes: It is North America's driest and hottest spot (with less than 2 inches of rainfall annually and a record high of 134°F), and has the lowest elevation in the Western Hemisphere—282 feet below sea level. Even with its extremes, the park still receives 1.3 million visitors each year.

In 1849 emigrants bound for California's gold fields strayed into the 120-mile-long basin, enduring a two-month ordeal of "hunger and thirst and an awful silence." One of the last to leave looked down from a mountain at the narrow valley and said, "Good-bye, Death Valley."

The forbidding moniker belies the beauty in this vast graben, the geological term for a sunken fragment of the earth's crust. Here are rocks sculptured by erosion, richly tinted mudstone hills and canyons, luminous sand dunes, lush oases, and a 200-square-mile salt pan surrounded by mountains, one of America's greatest vertical rises. In some years spring rains trigger wild-flower blooms amid more than 900 varieties of plants.

From 1883 to 1889, wagon teams hauled powdery white borax from mines since fallen to ruin, an enterprise that spread word of Death Valley's striking landscapes, deep solitude, and crystalline air.

As night falls, Death Valley's elusive population of bobcats, kit foxes, and rodents ventures out. Far above on steep mountain slopes, desert bighorn sheep forage among Joshua trees, scrubby junipers, and pines, while hawks soar on ther-mals rising into vivid blue, usually cloudless skies.