A large digital thermometer sits at the entrance to the gleaming midcentury modern visitor’s center in Furnace Creek, California. When we arrive on a Sunday afternoon, the place is swarming with people taking pictures, their phones out. There’s a sense of expectation in the crowd. A few hours east, in Las Vegas, the temperature has risen to 120°F, beating the city’s previous record by three degrees. But in the heart of Death Valley National Park, a high of 130°F is reported, which could tie the hottest day ever reliably measured on Earth. At 1 p.m., the big thermometer was already bouncing between 126 and 127°F.
The ranger told us not to get excited because the thermometer was a degree or two high. Our hopes were not fading. We still had a few hours before the day’s maximum temperature was reached. In the meantime, a circus-like atmosphere was in the air. I saw a man kneeling on the ground, surrounded by a camera crew. I approached him thinking he had caught a scorpion or a tarantula, but I saw he was holding a frying pan. He was about to fry a raw egg in the sun. As the clear, runny bits turned white, he yelled triumphantly at the doubters.
People stood in clusters in floppy hats and neckerchiefs. I heard a lot of French and German, and a bit of Dutch. Over the years I’d met many Europeans in the great parks of the West. Europe had no great deserts, and as a result people were great pilgrims of the dry earth: seekers of heat, space, and light. A trio of Germans were taking pictures of themselves, pointing at the temperature. I was a tourist too, but I, too, had retained a childlike enthusiasm for the highest expression. I wanted to experience the world record heat in my own body, not as a number in the headlines. I’d heard that summers in Death Valley, like many other places, were getting hotter and hotter. I imagined my body as a tuning fork that rang the planetary changes.
At 3:18 p.m., the slightly overheated thermometer rose to 130 degrees. I checked later and found the National Weather Service said the temperature was 129 degrees. I was familiar with the scorching heat of the desert in midsummer. My father lived in the red rock mountains of southern Utah for more than a decade, and I visited him all year round. I was there a few weeks ago, when the temperature was 113 degrees. But 129 degrees is something else. When you step out of your air-conditioned space into that heat, you feel its intensity even before the door closes behind you. It attacks you from above, like a clingy gargoyle made of fire that has landed on your head and neck. This gargoyle is a creature of pure desire. It wants only one thing: to bring you into thermal equilibrium with the desert. It targets your weak spots first, reaching the corners of your eyes and scorching your nostrils. After a few minutes, the wind begins to suck the moisture from your skin. I feel a tingling sensation in my forearms and calves. The wind makes things worse, blowing away the thin, brittle atmosphere of chilled air my sweat creates through my countless pores. My heart beats faster and faster, and my cognitive abilities begin to blur. After just eight minutes, I look down at my phone. It has completely shut down. I decide to consider it an act of solidarity.
The next morning, I went for a drive with Nicole Andler, the park’s chief interpreter. She helps visitors understand what they’re looking at, and makes sure they don’t just marvel at the park’s spectacular geology. She’d emailed me a few days before to “set the expectation,” saying she would only be outside her car for 10 minutes at a time. I was taken aback (I confessed to her later) and thought her caution was excessive, but the heat of the day before we met changed my mind. We drove up the eastern side of the valley in a white Jeep Grand Cherokee. Occasional static and numbered reports from other rangers calling in came over the walkie-talkie in the center console. She pointed to a hill covered in black volcanic rock. She told me that in the 1970s, Carl Sagan had used the terrain to test prototypes of the rovers that would later land on Mars. Death Valley has also been used as a stand-in for fictional planets. Star Wars The film was shot in a park because the landscape would likely be burned. Two Suns.
We soon arrived at Badwater Basin, a playa sandwiched between two mountain ranges that rise straight up from the valley floor. These mountains are not covered in dense forests like the Appalachians; they are the barren, charcoal-and-brown peaks of the basin and the range, the highest of which is 11,000 feet. A deep glacial lake once covered the valley, but after the earth warmed it evaporated, leaving only traces of minerals, mainly salt crystals, that give the playa its distinctive white glow. At 282 feet below sea level, Badwater Basin is the lowest point in North America. There was not a single cloud in the sky, not even a cirrus cloud or a fading contrail. (The next day, I saw a small cloud drifting over the edge of the valley, but it looked so out of place that I thought for a moment it was a balloon that a child had lost.) With almost no atmospheric obstruction, July sunlight pours down unobstructed into the valley for 14 hours a day. The dense air near the valley floor absorbs the sunlight’s heat and rises, but it doesn’t rise high enough to go over the mountains. Instead, the still-warm air settles and accumulates at lower altitudes. Andler likened the effect to that produced by a convection oven.
On some days, she says, it felt like the heat was penetrating her skin and muscles right down to her bones. After a period outside in 120-degree heat, rangers are instructed to cool down for 15 to 45 minutes. They do everything they can to shorten this time in case they’re needed for a rescue or other emergency. But be careful: “You might get back into a hot car in Death Valley, turn on the air conditioning and start to freshen up, only to find that your back is a completely different temperature than your front,” Andler says. (I pictured a gargoyle grinning at her in the rearview mirror.) In Death Valley, rangers are allowed to leave their parked cars running, allowing them to act as cooling chambers.
The day before I arrived in Death Valley, rangers had received a distress call from Badwater Basin. A group of six had entered the park on motorcycles and were showing signs of heat exhaustion. “They were on the front lines and we knew where they were, so the rangers responded quickly,” Andler said. One of them was pronounced dead at the scene, not far from where Andler and I were standing on the valley floor. The other three were taken to the visitor’s center for emergency medical treatment, one of whom was evacuated to a hospital in Las Vegas. The evacuation took extra time because the temperature was too high to send a helicopter into the park. “When you’re on a motorcycle, it’s hard because you’re exposed to the elements and wearing heavy gear,” Andler said. “I can only assume they didn’t cool down enough.” There was a sad silence between us.
That evening, I went to Zabriskie Point to watch the sun set and paint the valley’s wrinkled crags gold and pink. There were a crowd of tourists caught in the heat, but the tales of Andler’s bikers had me feeling less festive. After the sun went down, I returned to Furnace Creek. A desert rat fluttered across the road in my headlights. It was the only non-human mammal I saw, apart from a coyote that roamed the dunes at sunrise. It was two hours before darkness fell over Death Valley. A full moon gives the park’s salt flats an eerie glow, but that night it was a thin crescent. Soon it was dark, and I couldn’t see it even if I stretched out my hand. One of the starry arms of the Milky Way arced from horizon to horizon. I had hoped to stay up late to stargaze, but I only had 30 minutes. As of 10:30 p.m., the temperature in the valley floor was still 119 degrees.
On my way out of the park early the next morning, I pulled into the driveway. Do Not Enter I walked past the sign and onto Timbisha Shoshone land. In a small administrative office, I met Mandy Campbell, a 50-year-old woman who serves as the tribe’s historical preservation officer. Just as we sat down to talk, a heat wave warning rang on both our cell phones. I asked Campbell what the tribe thought of people who came to the park just for the thrill of experiencing near-130-degree heat. “I think they’re crazy,” she said. “I don’t understand why they would do that. I have a police radio at home, and it’s always ringing. It’s always, ‘Dehydration, dehydration, dehydration.'”
Campbell is one of 25 tribal members who live on the ancestral homeland of the Timbisha Shoshone at the bottom of the valley. Most have lived here their whole lives. “This heat is nothing new to us,” Campbell says. “We know how to stay cool by staying inside.” Tribal members live here year-round because they have air conditioning, but Campbell’s ancestors were wise to move to higher elevations during hotter months. Centuries ago, they built a summer home camp on the shoulder of the park’s mountains. “Right now it’s 80 degrees out there,” Campbell says. “It feels great.”
When white settlers arrived in Death Valley during the Gold Rush, the Timbisha Shoshone had been living there for over 1,000 years. The environment was too harsh for the mining industry. Less than a century later, the region’s major mining companies turned to tourism. One of the company’s executives lobbied Herbert Hoover to designate Death Valley as a national monument in 1933. Its first superintendent openly spoke of his desire to remove the Timbisha Shoshone. In 1957, after tribal members had left the valley floor for the summer, park officials called fire engines and ordered them to pour water on the tribe’s adobe buildings. Many of the walls were filled with mud. Only six buildings remain, three of which are still inhabited by tribal members.
Despite this history, Campbell told me that she personally has a good relationship with the park, now that some of the tribe’s lands have been returned. “We have to work together to protect this place,” she said. But she doesn’t hide her irritation at the name Death Valley. “They called it that because they didn’t care about this place,” she said. “Their settlers never came here. But this valley isn’t dead. It’s alive. There’s plenty of food. My ancestors hunted bighorn sheep here. They hunted rabbits. They gathered mesquite beans and ground them into flour to make bread. They knew where all the springs were. They had their trails, they had their ways. That’s why they were able to survive.”
Campbell’s aunt, Pauline Estevez, was a driving force in the tribe’s efforts to reclaim its land from the U.S. government. She served as both the chief activist and negotiator. I asked Campbell about her. I must have slipped into the subtle tone I use when assuming someone is dead. “She’s still alive,” Campbell retorted. “She’ll be 100 in December.” Estevez lives a few houses down from the tribal office. So do the tribe’s two other elders. “They’re tougher than us,” Campbell said, then began laughing. “When the power goes out in the summer, we yell to get out, but the elders don’t. All they want is a wet sheet to put on them. They don’t want to go anywhere.”
