Death Valley is a desert located in the southwestern United States. It is the lowest, driest, and hottest location in North America. Badwater, a basin located within Death Valley, is the specific location of the lowest elevation in North America at 282 ft (85.5 m ) below sea level. This point is only 76 miles (123 km) east of Mount Whitney, the highest point in the contiguous United States with an elevation of 14,505 feet (4,421 m). Death Valley holds the record for the highest reliably reported temperature in the Western hemisphere, 134°F (56.7°C) at Furnace Creek in 1913—just short of the world record, which was 136°F (58°C) in Al ‘Aziziyah, Libya, on September 13, 1922.
Death Valley|Death Valley National Park: Named features on maps of Death Valley National Park include the Funeral Mountains, Coffin Peak, Hell’s Gate, Starvation Canyon and Dead Man Pass – this is clearly a place with a bad history, reflecting the troubles and misfortunes endured by the pioneers who first traversed, inhabited and mined the region during the end of the last century. But despite the foreboding reputation, visitors today will find a place of amazing beauty with many colorful rocks and canyons, miles of pristine sand dunes, unique evaporative salt features and even a diverse range of wildlife. The park also contains many relics from a hundred and fifty years of history, which give an insight into the harsh life of the early settlers – borax and metal ore mines, ghost towns, charcoal kilns and other ruins. Petroglyphs and ancient foot-trails provide evidence of the Shoshone Indians who lived here even earlier.
The valley is a long, low depression set in largely barren and unpopulated country of desert plains and rocky ridges, east of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. It is over 130 miles long, but only around 12 miles wide, running roughly north-south near the border with Nevada.
From an elevation of 1000 meters at the north end, the land slopes down steadily and for 70 miles the floor is below sea level, reaching a low point of -86 meters at Badwater, the lowest point in the Western hemisphere. The depth of the depression is partly responsible for the extreme high temperatures, which can exceed 130°F in summer. High, unvegetated mountains of sombre reddish colour flank the narrow valley on both sides; a few are high enough to have snow for many months of the year.
The protected area, proclaimed a National Monument in 1933, was extended in 1994 (by the Desert Protection Act) to include an additional 1200,000 acres, mainly in the little-visited northwest section, and was upgraded in status to a National Park; this now covers 3 million acres, making it the largest in the US outside Alaska. Nearly 550 square miles are below sea level.
