Death Valley National Park

Pop-up Lake At Badwater Basin Salt Flats, Death Valley

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Visitors gather at the sprawling temporary lake in the Badwater Basin salt flats of Death Valley national park, California. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images

We had been wondering what the place might look like after Burning Man brought the rare weather to our attention:

Death Valley visitors delight in rare ephemeral lakes left behind by storm

Shimmering bodies of water have appeared in the sand dunes of the recently reopened national park after a summer deluge

After months of closure, visitors to Death Valley national park are being greeted by stunning new features, including lakes left behind by a ferocious summer deluge. Continue reading →

A Further Note On Death Valley National Park

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The Timbisha Shoshone elder Pauline Esteves in 1999. In 1933, when Esteves was eight, her tribe’s homeland was declared Death Valley National Monument. PHOTOGRAPH BY LAURA RAUCH / AP

We had already published several posts mentioning one of the earth’s more remarkable deserts. But the spectacle that desert displayed this year brought it back to our attention, for several important reasons. Click here (or on the image above) to go to Alex Ross’s update of the epic article he published on Death Valley recently, which we linked to here:

“In the desert, you see, there is everything and there is nothing,” Balzac wrote. “It is God without mankind.” The sensation of sublime emptiness, of a sacred void, explains the enduring romantic appeal of a place like Death Valley,: Continue reading →

Millennial Weather Effects In A Unique Spot

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In the spring, the valley shimmered with myriad points of color, as if Georges Seurat had touched up a Georgia O’Keeffe. PHOTOGRAPH BY JIM MANGAN

This is one of the longest articles in recent memory, but worth every word on every page. Wishing only that there were more photos or that we could have been there to see it:

DEATH VALLEY IS ALIVE

This year, a historic deluge created a Superbloom of wildflowers in one of the hottest places on Earth.

By Alex Ross

Death Valley, the majestically desolate national park on the eastern edge of California, is a rain-shadow desert, meaning that nearby mountain ranges drain moisture from incoming weather systems and stop rain from reaching the other side. Eighty miles to the west is the Sierra Nevada range, the highest in the contiguous forty-eight states, rising to fourteen thousand five hundred feet. Continue reading →