Death Valley National Park Death Valley National Park Sand Dunes in Death Valley National P Sand dunes in Death Valley National Park Map showing the locale of Death Valley National Park Map showing the locale of Death Valley National Park - Death Valley Website Death Valley Park and Preserve Death Valley National Park is a nationwide park in the United States.
The park protects the northwest corner of the Mojave Desert and contains a diverse desert surrounding of salt-flats, sand dunes, badlands, valleys, canyons, and mountain peaks.
It is the biggest national park in the lower 48 states and has been declared an International Biosphere Reserve.
Approximately 91% of the park is a designated wilderness area. It is the hottest, driest and lowest of the nationwide parks in the United States. The second-lowest point in the Western Hemisphere is in Badwater Basin, which is 282 feet (86 m) below sea level.
Some examples include creosote bush, bighorn sheep, coyote, and the Death Valley pupfish, a survivor of much wetter times.
A series of Native American groups inhabited the region from as early as 7000 BC, most recently the Timbisha around 1000 AD who migrated between winter camps in the valleys and summer grounds in the mountain peaks.
A group of European-Americans that became stuck in the valley in 1849 while looking for a shortcut to the gold fields of California gave the valley its name, even though only one of their group died there.
The only long-term profitable ore to be mined was borax, which was transported out of the valley with twenty-mule teams.
The valley later became the subject of books, radio programs, tv series, and movies.
Death Valley National Monument was declared in 1933 and the park was substantially period and became a nationwide park in 1994. Valleys filled with sediment and, amid the wet times of glacial periods, with lakes, such as Lake Manly.
In 2013, Death Valley National Park was designated as a dark sky park by the International Dark-Sky Association. There are two primary valleys in the park, Death Valley and Panamint Valley.
Both of these valleys were formed inside the last several million years and both are bounded by north south-trending mountain peaks. These and adjoining valleys follow the general trend of Basin and Range topography with one modification: there are alongside strike-slip faults that perpendicularly bound the central extent of Death Valley.
The result of this shearing action is additional extension in the central part of Death Valley which causes a slight widening and more subsidence there.
Uplift of encircling mountain peaks and subsidence of the valley floor are both occurring.
At 282 feet (86 m) below sea level at its lowest point, Badwater Basin on Death Valley's floor is the second-lowest depression in the Western Hemisphere (behind Laguna del Carbon in Argentina), while Mount Whitney, only 85 miles (137 km) to the west, rises to 14,505 feet (4,421 m). This topographic relief is the greatest altitude gradient in the adjoining United States and is the end point of the Great Basin's southwestern drainage. Although the extreme lack of water in the Great Basin makes this distinct ion of little current practical use, it does mean that in wetter times the lake that once filled Death Valley (Lake Manly) was the last stop for water flowing in the region, meaning the water there was saturated in dissolved materials.
Thus the salt pans in Death Valley are among the biggest in the world and are rich in minerals, such as borax and various salts and hydrates. The biggest salt pan in the park extends 40 miles (64 km) from the Ashford Mill Site to the Salt Creek Hills, covering some 200 square miles (520 km2) of the valley floor.[note 1] The best known playa in the park is the Racetrack, known for its moving rocks.
Map of the park showing old Monument territory (light green) and the period Park territory (dark green) Sea Level sign seen on cliff (circled in red) at Badwater Basin, Death Valley National Park.
A slice through the highest and lowest points in Death Valley National Park Death Valley is the hottest and driest place in North America due to its lack of surface water and low relief.
It is so incessantly the hottest spot in the United States that many tabulations of the highest daily temperatures in the nation omit Death Valley as a matter of course. On the afternoon of July 10, 1913, the United States Weather Bureau recorded a high temperature of 134 F (56.7 C) at Greenland Ranch (now Furnace Creek) in Death Valley. This temperature stands as the highest ambient air temperature ever recorded at the surface of the Earth.
(A report of a temperature of 58 C (136.4 F) recorded in Libya in 1922 was later determined to be inaccurate.) Daily summer temperatures of 120 F (49 C) or greater are common, as well as below freezing eveningly temperatures in the winter. July is the hottest month, with an average high of 115 F (46 C) and an average low of 88 F (31 C). December is the coldest month, with an average high of 65 F (18 C) and an average low of 39 F (4 C). The record low is 15 F ( 9.4 C). Several of the larger Death Valley springs derive their water from a county-wide aquifer, which extends as far east as southern Nevada and Utah.
The highest range inside the park is the Panamint Range with Telescope Peak being its highest point at 11,049 feet (3,368 m). The Death Valley region is a transitional zone in the northernmost part of the Mojave Desert and consists of five mountain peaks removed from the Pacific Ocean.
The exaggerated rainshadow effect for the Death Valley region makes it North America's driest spot, receiving about 1.5 inches (38 mm) of rainfall annually at Badwater (some years fail to register any calculable rainfall). Annual average rain varies from 1.92 inches (49 mm) overall below sea level to over 15 inches (380 mm) in the higher mountain peaks that surround the valley. When precipitation does arrive it often does so in intense storms that cause flash floods which remodel the landscape and sometimes problematic very shallow ephemeral lakes. The Mesquite Flat dune field is the most easily accessible from the paved road just east of Stovepipe Wells in the north-central part of the valley and is primarily made of quartz sand.
Another dune field is just 10 miles (16 km) to the north but is instead mostly composed of travertine sand. The highest dunes in the park, and some of the highest in North America, are positioned in the Eureka Valley about 50 miles (80 km) to the north of Stovepipe Wells, while the Panamint Valley dunes and the Saline Valley dunes are positioned west and northwest of the town, in the order given.
In 2005, an unusually wet winter created a 'lake' in the Badwater Basin and led to the greatest wildflower season in the park's history. In October 2015, a "1000 year flood event" with over three inches of precipitation caused primary damage in Death Valley National Park. Climate data for Death Valley (Furnace Creek Station) Climate data for Death Valley (Cow Creek Station) Four Native American cultures are known to have lived in the region during the last 10,000 years. The first known group, the Nevares Spring People, were hunters and gatherers who appeared in the region perhaps 9,000 years ago (7000 BC) when there were still small lakes in Death Valley and neighboring Panamint Valley. A much milder climate persisted at that time, and large game animals were still plentiful.
One-thousand years ago, the nomadic Timbisha (formerly called Shoshone and also known as Panamint or Koso) moved into the region and hunted game and gathered mesquite beans along with pinyon pine nuts. Because of the wide altitude differential between the valley bottom and the mountain ridges, especially on the west, the Timbisha practiced a vertical migration pattern. Their winter camps were positioned near water sources in the valley bottoms.
November found them at the very top of the mountain ridges where they harvested pine nuts before moving back to the valley bottom for winter.
In December 1849 two groups of California Gold Country-bound white travelers with perhaps 100 wagons total stumbled into Death Valley after getting lost on what they thought was a shortcut off the Old Spanish Trail. Called the Bennett-Arcane Party, they were unable to find a pass out of the valley for weeks; they were able to find fresh water at various springs in the area, but were forced to eat a several of their oxen to survive.
Just after leaving the valley, one of the women in the group turned and said, "Goodbye Death Valley," giving the valley they railroadits name. Included in the party was William Lewis Manly whose autobiographical book Death Valley in '49 specified this trek and popularized the region (geologists later titled the prehistoric lake that once filled the valley after him).
A twenty-mule team in Death Valley Historical locomotive for borax-carrying in Death Valley (Furnace-Creek-Museum), USA, in June 1993 Civilian Conservation Corps workers in Death Valley Twenty-mule Team Canyon, Death Valley Borax was found by Rosie and Aaron Winters near Furnace Creek Ranch (then called Greenland) in 1881. Later that same year, the Eagle Borax Works became Death Valley's first commercial borax operation.
William Tell Coleman assembled the Harmony Borax Works plant and began to process ore in late 1883 or early 1884, closing until 1888. This quarrying and smelting business produced borax to make soap and for industrialized uses. The end product was shipped out of the valley 165 miles (266 km) to the Mojave railhead in 10-ton-capacity wagons pulled by "twenty-mule teams" that were actually squads of 18 mules and two horses each. A memorable advertising campaign used the wagon's image to promote the Boraxo brand of granular hand soap and the Death Valley Days radio and tv programs.
In 1914, the Death Valley Railroad was assembled to serve quarrying operations on the east side of the valley.
Mining continued after the collapse of Coleman's empire, and by the late 1920s the region was the world's number one origin of borax. Some four to six million years old, the Furnace Creek Formation is the major source of borate minerals gathered from Death Valley's playas. The first documented tourist facilities in Death Valley were a set of tent homes assembled in the 1920s where Stovepipe Wells is now located.
In 1927, Pacific Coast Borax turned the crew quarters of its Furnace Creek Ranch into a resort, creating the Furnace Creek Inn and resort. The spring at Furnace Creek was harnessed to precarious the resort, and as the water was diverted, the encircling marshes and wetlands started to shrink. Most notable among these was Death Valley Ranch, better known as Scotty's Castle.
This large ranch home assembled in the Spanish Revival style became a hotel in the late 1930s and, largely because of the fame of Death Valley Scotty, a tourist attraction.
Death Valley Scotty, whose real name was Walter Scott, was a gold miner who pretended to be owner of "his castle", which he claimed to have assembled with profits from his gold mine.
President Herbert Hoover proclaimed a nationwide monument in and around Death Valley on February 11, 1933, setting aside almost two million acres (8,000 km2) of southeastern California and small parts of southwesternmost Nevada. Twelve companies worked in Death Valley using Civilian Conservation Corps workers amid the Great Depression and on into the early 1940s.
However, Death Valley was quickly reopened to quarrying by Congressional action in June of the same year.
As improvements in quarrying technology allowed lower grades of ore to be processed, and new heavy equipment allowed greater amounts of modern to be moved, quarrying in Death Valley changed.
The enhance outcry that ensued led to greater protection for all nationwide park and monument areas in the United States. In 1976, Congress passed the Mining in the Parks Act, which closed Death Valley National Monument to the filing of new quarrying claims, banned open-pit quarrying and required the National Park Service to examine the validity of tens of thousands of pre-1976 quarrying claims.
The park's Resources Management Division monitors quarrying inside park boundaries and continues to review the status of 19 patented quarrying claim groups and less than 10 unpatented quarrying claims, while ensuring that federal guidelines are followed and the park's resources are protected.
Death Valley National Monument was designated a biosphere reserve in 1984. On October 31, 1994, the monument was period by 1.3 million acres (5,300 km2) and re-designated as a nationwide park, via congressional passage of the California Desert Protection Act (Public Law 103-433). Consequently, the elevated status for Death Valley made it the biggest national park in the adjoining United States.
Notable examples inside a 100-mile (160 km) radius of Death Valley National Park include Las Vegas and Pahrump, Nevada.
In 1977, parts of Death Valley were used by director George Lucas as a recording locale for Star Wars, providing the setting for the fictional planet Tatooine. Major unconformity, continued deposition in undivided Death Valley, opening of undivided Death Valley, closing evolution of present ranges and basins, onset of primary extension.
Mesozoic Granitic plutons, Butte Valley Thrust faulting and intrusion of plutons related to Sierra Nevada batholith; shallow marine deposition; unconformity.
Paleozoic Resting spring Shale, Tin Mountain Limestone, Lost Burro, Hidden Valley Dolomite, Eureka Quartzite, Nopah, Bonanza King, Carrara, Zabriskie Quartzite, Wood Canyon.
The deep Death Valley watershed is filled with sediment (light yellow) eroded from the encircling mountain peaks.
Main article: Geology of the Death Valley region Radiometric dating gives an age of 1,700 million years for the metamorphism amid the Proterozoic. About 1,400 million years ago a mass of granite now in the Panamint Range intruded this complex. Uplift later exposed these rocks to nearly 500 million years of erosion. Death Valley's position was then inside ten or twenty degrees of the Paleozoic equator.
Sediments worn off the Death Valley region were carried both east and west by wind and water. No Jurassic- to Eocene-aged sedimentary formations exist in the area, except for some possibly Jurassic-age volcanic rocks (see the top of the timescale image). During very wet periods, the Amargosa River can flow at the surface, as it did in Death Valley amid the wet winter of 2005.
Basin and Range-associated stretching of large parts of crust below southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico started around 16 million years ago and the region is still spreading. This stretching began to affect the Death and Panamint valleys region by 3 million years ago. Before this, rocks now in the Panamint Range were on top of rocks that would turn into the Black Mountains and the Cottonwood Mountains.
Igneous activeness associated with this stretching occurred from 12 million to 4 million years ago. Sedimentation is concentrated in valleys (basins) from material eroded from adjoining ranges.
The amount of sediment deposited has roughly kept up with this subsidence, resulting in retention of more or less the same valley floor altitude over time. Pleistocene ice ages started 2 million years ago, and melt from alpine glaciers on the close-by Sierra Nevada Mountains fed a series of lakes that filled Death and Panamint valleys and encircling basins (see the top of the timescale image).
The lake that filled Death Valley was the last of a chain of lakes fed by the Amargosa and Mojave Rivers, and possibly also the Owens River.
The large lake that veiled much of Death Valley's floor, which geologists call Lake Manly, started to dry up 10,500 years ago. Saltpans and playas were created as ice age glaciers retreated, thus drastically reducing the lakes' water source.
Habitat varies from saltpan at 282 feet (86 m) below sea level to the sub-alpine conditions found on the summit of Telescope Peak, which rises to 11,049 feet (3,368 m). Vegetation zones include Creosote Bush, Desert Holly, and mesquite at the lower elevations and sage up through shadscale, blackbrush, Joshua Tree, pinyon-juniper, to Limber Pine and Bristlecone Pine woodlands. The saltpan is devoid of vegetation, and the rest of the valley floor and lower slopes have sparse cover, although where water is available, an abundance of vegetation is usually present.
Small mammals are more various than large mammals, such as bighorn sheep, coyotes (image), bobcats, kit foxes, cougars, and mule deer. Mule deer are present in the pinyon/juniper associations of the Grapevine, Cottonwood, and Panamint ranges. Bighorn sheep are a rare species of mountain sheep that exist in isolated bands in the Sierra and in Death Valley.
Death Valley Pupfish spawning in Salt Creek The ancestors of the Death Valley Pupfish swam to the region from the Colorado River via a long-since dried-up fitness of rivers and lakes (see Lake Manly).
Death Valley is one of the hottest and driest places in North America, yet it is home to over 1,000 species of plants; 23 of which, including the very rare Rock Lady (Holmgrenanthe petrophila), are not found anywhere else. The range of Death Valley's plant communities results partly from the region's locale in a transition zone between the Mojave Desert, the Great Basin Desert and the Sonoran Desert.
Unlike more typical locations athwart the Mojave Desert, many of the water-dependent Death Valley surroundings possess a range of plant and animal species that are not found anywhere else in the world. The existence of these species is due largely to a unique geologic history and the process of evolution that has progressed in surroundings that have been isolated from one another since the Pleistocene epoch. See also: Places of interest in the Death Valley region Costumed living history tours of the historic Death Valley Scotty's Castle are conducted for a fee, but as of October 2015, are suspended due to flood damage to the buildings and grounds. There are nine designated campgrounds inside the park, and overnight backcountry camping permits are available at the Visitor Center. Xanterra Parks & Resorts owns and operates a private resort, the Furnace Creek Inn and Ranch Resort, which comprises two separate and distinct hotels: the Furnace Creek Inn is a four-star historic hotel, and the Furnace Creek Ranch is a three-star ranch-style property reminiscent of the quarrying and prospecting days.
Death Valley Lodging Company operates the Stovepipe Wells Village motel.
Stovepipe Wells Village is the only authorized concession operations positioned in Death Valley National Park.
There are a several motels near entrances to the park, in Shoshone, Death Valley Junction, Beatty, Nevada, and Panamint Springs.
A 12-minute introductory slide program is shown every 30 minutes. During the winter season November through April rangers offer interpretive tours and a wide range of walks, talks, and slide presentations about Death Valley cultural and natural history.
The Death Valley Natural History Association maintains a bookstore specifically geared to the natural and cultural history of the park.
Death Valley National Park is a prominent location for stargazing as it has one of the darkest evening skies in the United States.
National Register of Historic Places listings in Death Valley National Park Badwater, the Devils Golf Course, and Salt Creek are all part of the Death Valley Saltpan.
The last known lake to exist in Death Valley likely dried up 3,000 years ago.
National Park Index (2001 2003), p.
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This article incorporates enhance domain material from websites or documents of the National Park Service.
Death Valley General Management Plan (PDF).
Death Valley National Park Visitor Guide 2008/2009 (PDF).
"Death Valley National Park website".
Death Valley National Park: A History (University of Nevada Press; 2013) 216 pages; an surroundingal and human history Geology Underfoot in Death Valley and Owens Valley.
"Death Valley National Park Virtual Geology Field Trip".
"Death Valley's Incredible Weather".
Ancient Peoples and Cultures of Death Valley National Monument.
"Chapter 46: Death Valley National Park, Eastern California and southwestern Nevada".
Media related to Death Valley National Park at Wikimedia Commons Death Valley National Park travel guide from Wikivoyage Official website by the National Park Service Fossils In Death Valley National Park 1920s images of Death Valley and Surrounding Locales from the Death Valley Region Photographs Digital Collection: Utah State University Articles and topics related to Death Valley National Park National parks of the United States
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IUCN Category IIDeath Valley National Park - Death Valley - National parks in California - Protected areas of the Mojave Desert - Protected areas of the Great Basin - Sandboarding locations - Parks in Inyo County, California - Parks in San Bernardino County, California - National parks in Nevada - Protected areas of Nye County, Nevada - Protected areas of Esmeralda County, Nevada - Protected areas established in 1994 - Civilian Conservation Corps in California - Parks in Southern California
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