Death Valley is a desert trough on the California–Nevada border where the hottest air temperature ever recorded on Earth was measured, 56.7°C in 1913, and where the ground sinks to 86 metres below sea level. At Badwater Basin that low point is a dry lakebed. The salt has dried and shrunk into a crust of hexagonal polygons running to the horizon, and it crackles under your boots; a marker high on the cliff behind shows where sea level is, far over your head. From Dante's View, more than 1,600 metres up on the eastern rim, the same white floor runs a hundred kilometres north with 3,366-metre Telescope Peak standing across it. At Zabriskie Point the folded, golden-brown badlands take the first light while the spire of Manly Beacon throws its shadow over the valley. Both are coldest and clearest at dawn, while the basin is still in shadow.
The dunes at Mesquite Flat are climbed barefoot in the cool of the morning, when the night wind has sharpened every crest and the shadows they throw shorten and change shape by the minute. Artist's Drive takes you one-way up to volcanic slopes streaked pink, turquoise, green and purple, each colour a different mineral in the old ash: iron, mica, manganese. On a remote clay flat in the north, heavy rocks sit at the ends of long tracks ploughed across dried mud. For decades nobody saw them move, until cameras caught rafts of thin ice pushing them along in a light breeze. Roughly once a decade a well-timed wet winter carpets the floor in gold wildflowers; in most years almost nothing flowers here at all. From April the heat turns lethal, and a walk below sea level can genuinely kill you. People live here anyway. This is the homeland of the Timbisha Shoshone, whose name means rock paint, after the red ochre in these hills, and in 2000 about thirty square kilometres of it were returned to them — the only reservation ever created inside a US national park. Around fifty members live at Furnace Creek today.