Furnace Creek

Read the park entrance signs on the way in and you will see a second line under the name: Homeland of the Timbisha Shoshone. It was added after November 1, 2000, when the Timbisha Shoshone Homeland Act put 313.99 acres at Furnace Creek into trust for the tribe, along with roughly 7,800 acres in all. Before that the tribe had lived since 1936 on about forty acres here, on sufferance, without a land base in its own country, and had spent decades resisting attempts to move it off. Federal recognition came in 1983; the land came seventeen years later, and Death Valley became the first national park in the country to return ground to the people it was taken from. The village is a residential community, with a buffer written into the law to protect the privacy of the people who live in it. Drive past it the way you would drive past anyone's street.

Everything else here is the business of the valley: the visitor center, the fuel pumps, the two lodgings, the campgrounds, the airstrip, all sitting about 190 feet below sea level. On July 10, 1913, a thermometer at what was then Greenland Ranch read 134 degrees, still the official world record and still doubted by the climatologists who have gone back through the observer's notebooks. The modern instruments have twice reached 130, in 2020 and again in 2021.

A mile and a half north, the ruins of the Harmony Borax Works mark where Chinese laborers scraped cottonball borax off the flats in the 1880s for a dollar and thirty cents a day.