Zabriskie Point

The hills below the overlook are lakebed. They belong to the Furnace Creek Formation, thousands of feet of mudstone, siltstone, and volcanic ash laid down on the floor of a lake that began forming roughly nine million years ago and dried out around five million years back, long before Death Valley took anything like its present shape. Afterward the valley widened and dropped, the Black Mountains rose and tilted the whole deposit, and water went to work on soft rock with nowhere to soak in. What you see is the result: a gullied, folded, gold and brown badland that changes hour by hour with the light.

Manly Beacon is the high outcrop to the right. It keeps its height because a cap of lava three to five million years old protects the softer rock beneath, and it carries the name of William Lewis Manly, who with John Rogers walked out of this valley in the winter of 1849 and came back for the emigrant party that had sent them.

The overlook itself is named for Christian Brevoort Zabriskie, vice president and general manager of the Pacific Coast Borax Company for thirty-six years. The borates his twenty mule teams hauled out of the valley came from these same lakebeds, which makes the name less decorative than it sounds. The parking lot is three miles southeast of Furnace Creek on CA-190, with a short paved ramp to the rail. Twenty Mule Team Canyon is a mile further on.