Death Valley & the Basin Ranges
The Timbisha homeland the maps call Death Valley — the lowest ground in North America, the Panamint wall above it, Trona's tufa spires, and an opera house in the middle of the Amargosa desert.
The people were never gone, and they are not gone now. The Timbisha — Nümü Tümpisattsi, the people of Tümpisa, named for the red ochre rock paint gathered near Furnace Creek — have lived in this valley for a thousand years and more, moving with the seasons between the salt-pan floor and the cool of the Panamints. When the national monument arrived in 1933 it took their homeland out from under them; the tribe won federal recognition in 1983, and with the Timbisha Homeland Act of 2000 got land back inside the park itself — their village still sits at Furnace Creek, where for decades before that the tribe had been confined to a forty-acre corner of its own country. Hold both names in mind as you drive: the newcomers named this place for death, but the people who know it best named it for pigment, for something the land gives.
The geography runs to extremes and does not apologize for it. The valley floor drops below sea level into salt flats that shimmer white to the horizon, while Telescope Peak stands two miles above the same spot — basin and range at full stretch, inside the largest national park in the contiguous United States. Beyond the park boundary the pattern repeats: the dry lakebed of Panamint Valley, and the Trona Pinnacles' tufa towers rising off a Pleistocene lake bottom like a set for another planet, which they have often played. On the eastern side, the Amargosa country keeps its own strange faith — date shakes and warm springs at Tecopa and Shoshone, and at Death Valley Junction the Amargosa Opera House, where a dancer painted herself an audience on the walls and performed either way.
Come in the cooler months, carry more water than seems reasonable, and let the distances do the talking.
What to See in Death Valley & the Basin Ranges
9 places across the region, grouped by what they are.
Geology & Rock Formations
Natural Areas
Towns & Gateways
Scenic Drives through Death Valley & the Basin Ranges
Stories from Death Valley & the Basin Ranges
Death Valley & the Basin Ranges rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.
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