A warning greets visitors to Death Valley National Park in July. Climate change is making the world a place of extremes. Death Valley is already there.
If the world really is going to hell, please get your brakes checked. The ride will be very downhill.
I learned that lesson, among others, after my brakes started to smoke while descending down, down, down Highway 190 into California’s answer to the underworld — Death Valley.
I did not run into the Devil on this Death Valley visit. But I did enjoy the otherworldly vistas of mountains, deserts and salt flats in Death Valley locations like Dante’s View, Hell’s Gate and the Amargosa Chaos.
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Despite such sights, Death Valley attracts just over 1 million visitors annually, just one-third as many as cram into Yosemite each year.
This relatively lower number of visitors is healthier for the sensitive desert ecosystems. But Death Valley deserves Yosemite-level respect, and not just for its 130-plus temperatures or the damage that a drive to the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere can do to your car.
Death Valley, bigger than Connecticut, is the largest national park in the continental United States and one of the world’s largest sections of protected desert. The National Park Service bills it as a “vast geological museum” with visible examples from most of the planet’s geologic eras.
Nearly all of it is officially wilderness, providing quiet, darkness and solitude unmatched anywhere else in our state.
Now, Death Valley offers a portal to our planetary future. As the climate changes, our world is becoming a place of extremes. Death Valley is already there. It’s at once the hottest and driest place in the country and a place where a sudden, dangerous storm can bring snow, level hills or revive ancient lakes.
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Because of its scary extremes, Death Valley is misunderstood. Just as Voltaire quipped that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy nor Roman nor a real empire, Death Valley is not exactly a valley, nor is it dead.
It’s a graben, a block of the Earth’s crust dropped between two higher pieces of crust. And it’s full of life — with more than 300 species of birds, 50 species of native mammals and even species of native fish.
Understanding the way life flourishes in Death Valley should demonstrate that, as California’s landscapes and climate change, we shouldn’t trust our eyes. Places may look more barren, but they still contain much that is worthy of our devotion.
Protecting places of extremes will demand more sharing of responsibility and more varied participation in governance. In recent years, Death Valley has received notice for a novel governance system that empowers its Indigenous residents, the Timbisha Shoshone.
In 2000, after decades of activism, the federal government created the first reservation inside a national park for the Timbisha Shoshone. Since then, the tribe and the National Park Service have co-managed Death Valley in the service of protecting its treasures and allowing its Native people to use the park for their traditional practices.
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The collaboration initially drew criticism from some environmentalists who didn’t want people, even the Indigenous, touching too much of the park. But in recent years, such criticism has faded because of the mounting threat of climate change to the park, and the ability of humans to survive there.
As the philosopher Margret Grebowicz described in a January essay for the New Republic, Death Valley’s already scorching summer temperatures have risen, drying up the piñon pine nuts and killing off the honey mesquite, both of which the tribe’s members harvest. The heat also makes the Shoshone’s summer migration more dangerous.
Along with the greater heat has come unusual rain. Death Valley has seen a “thousand-year” storm in each of the past two years, forcing temporary park closures.
The 2023 storm — remnants of Hurricane Hilary — created ephemeral lakes, some of which are still present. This includes Lake Manly, which last appeared in 2005 in Badwater Basin, a remnant of a large lake that dominated Death Valley in ancient times.
After a mechanic added some brake fluid to my car, I visited Lake Manly, which demonstrated one silver lining of our downhill drive to climate hell: There will be some compensating beauty.
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To reach the lake, you walk across white salt flats resembling freshly fallen snow. The lake perfectly reflects the Panamint Mountains to the west. Its color is silvery blue and feels not quite of this planet.
Several visitors removed their shoes to wade into the 2-feet-deep waters. Among them was a Nevada church group, one of whose members appropriately recited the 23rd Psalm, and its famous lines about facing future peril:
Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.
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