The largest national park south of Alaska, Death Valley is known for extremes: It is North America's driest and hottest spot (with less than two inches/five centimeters of rainfall annually and a record high of 134°F), and has the lowest elevation of the continent—282 feet below sea level. Even with its extremes, the park still receives nearly a 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 park protects the northwest corner of the Mojave Desert and contains a diverse desert environment of salt-flats, sand dunes, badlands, valleys, canyons, and mountains. It is the largest national park in the lower 48 states and has been declared an International Biosphere Reserve. Approximately 95% of the park is a designated wilderness area. It is the hottest and driest of the national parks in the United States. The second-lowest point in the Western Hemisphere is in Badwater Basin, which is 280 feet (85 m) below sea level. The park is home to many species of plants and animals that have adapted to this harsh desert environment. Some examples includecreosote bush, bighorn sheep, coyote, and the Death Valley pupfish, a survivor of much wetter times.
A series of Native American groups inhabited the area 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 mountains. 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. Several short-lived boom towns sprang up during the late 19th and early 20th centuries to mine gold and silver.
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