Free Republic

TECOPA, Calif. — Sometimes the desert holds its secrets close, whispering them only to those who carefully listen. But this year, the hottest and driest place in America might as well be shouting. In California’s Death Valley region, the last few months have been remarkably loud. And the latest bellow is still ringing out, with the area’s native wildflowers bursting into bloom. The flowers have filled a place best known for its shades of browns and grays with brilliant blasts...

There's a lake at the base of Death Valley.

A 71-year-old Los Angeles man died in California’s Death Valley National Park on Tuesday, likely due to heat, as the afternoon high recorded in the park was 121 degrees, officials said. The Inyo County Coroner identified the deceased as Steven Curry. Curry fell to the ground outside the restroom at the Golden Canyon trailhead, the Inyo County Sheriff’s Office and the national park wrote in a news release. Before collapsing, Curry had been interviewed in the early morning by a Los Angeles Times reporter at Zabriskie Point; he had hiked about 2 miles from Golden Canyon to the point. “It’s...

DEATH VALLEY NATIONAL PARK, Calif. — As uninviting as it sounds, Death Valley National Park beckons. Even as the already extreme temperatures are forecast to climb even higher, potentially topping records amid a major U.S. heat wave, tourists are arriving at this infamous desert landscape on the California-Nevada border. Daniel Jusehus snapped a photo earlier this week of a famed thermometer outside the aptly named Furnace Creek Visitor Center after challenging himself to a run in the sweltering heat. "I was really noticing, you know, I didn't feel so hot, but my body was working really hard to cool myself,"...

A California man died from extreme heat at Death Valley National Park amid the highest temperature recorded on Earth this year, park officials said. The 65-year-old man from San Diego was found dead in his vehicle on Monday morning, Abby Wines, a spokesperson for the park, told SFGATE. This came the day after Death Valley reached 126 degrees, the hottest temperature anywhere on the planet in 2023. A maintenance worker noticed the man’s vehicle just after 10 a.m. Monday about 30 yards away from North Highway, park officials said in a news release. The worker found the man unresponsive, prompting...

The family of an Arizona congressional staffer who died while camping in Death Valley National Park in California have revealed that his SUV had gotten stranded with two flat tires, and his wife suffered a severe injury to her foot during the ill-fated trip last week. Alexander Lofgren, 32, and Emily Henkel, 27, were found on Friday on a steep ledge near Willow Creek, California, but Lofgren did not survive....

Geologists 750% Wrong in Death Valley Posted on January 23, 2012 in Dating Methods, Geology, Physical Science, Physics A volcanic explosion in northern Death Valley occurred 800 years ago, not 6,000, “far more recently than generally thought,” according to new dating estimates. The event that created Ubehebe Crater is so recent, in fact, geologists think another devastating explosion could happen today. “This certainly adds another dimension to what we tell the public,” a park ranger said after hearing the announcement reported on Science Daily. Using isotopic ages on rocks blown out of the crater, geologists from Columbia University calculated dates...

Against a backdrop of jumbled boulders and spindly trees, former Joshua Tree National Park Supt. Curt Sauer joined dozens of people at a rally in this high desert enclave on Saturday to express their anger over the economic and physical damage caused by the partial government shutdown to the park and the surrounding community. President Trump signed a short-term spending bill on Friday that will reopen the government until Feb. 15. But the 35-day shutdown has already taken a heavy toll on the economy of this dusty refuge for nature lovers, rock climbers and artists at the main gateway to...

It is a slam-dunk certainty that American mainstream media will seize upon a recent story in the Los Angeles Times, “Southern California sets all-time heat records amid broiling conditions,” as justification for its continuing support of the contested theory of man-caused global warming. It has already happened with a Yahoo News story claiming that the new temperature records world-wide prove man causes climate change.But there are problems in pursuing that path.First, days that reach and exceed 117-degree temperatures have been known to happen for a very long time in the interior basin of southern California, sometimes referred to as “Death...

There’s hot, and then there’s Death Valley hot. While Southern California and much of the West cooked in July under a pair of heat waves that killed livestock, knocked out power and encouraged wildfires, nowhere was the heat more brutally enduring than in Death Valley. According to the National Weather Service, Death Valley National Park broke its 100-year-old record for the hottest month ever in July, when the average temperature was 107.4 degrees, eclipsing the 1917 record of 107.2 degrees. Though 107 degrees doesn’t sound that bad, keep in mind the average includes nighttime temperatures. The average overnight temperature in...

Death Valley, one of the hottest places on Earth, is currently a riot of color: More than 20 different kinds of desert wildflowers are in bloom there after record-breaking rains last October. It's the best bloom there since 2005, according to Abby Wines, a spokeswoman for Death Valley National Park, and "it just keeps getting better and better." The flowers started poking up in November, but the particularly colorful display emerged late last month in the park, which is mainly in California but stretches across the Nevada border. On Twitter and Instagram, park visitors have taken to calling it a...

Ending a half-century of geological speculation, scientists have finally seen the process that causes rocks to move atop Racetrack Playa, a desert lake bed in the mountains above Death Valley, California. Researchers watched a pond freeze atop the playa, then break apart into sheets of ice that — blown by wind — shoved rocks across the lake bed. Until now, no one has been able to explain why hundreds of rocks scoot unseen across the playa surface, creating trails behind them like children dragging sticks through the mud. “It’s a delight to be involved in sorting out this kind of...

The first witnesses to an enduring natural mystery are an engineer, a biologist and a planetary scientist who met thanks to a remote weather station. Lacking direct evidence, explanations for this geologic puzzle ran the gamut, from Earth's magnetic field to gale-force winds to slippery algae. Now, with video, time-lapse photographs and GPS tracking of Racetrack Playa's moving rocks, the mystery has finally been solved.

It's a geological enigma that's had scientists speculating for half a century. But the mystery behind Death Valley's 'Wandering Stones' has finally been uncovered. It was previously unknown what caused the rocks to move across Racetrack Playa, a desert lake bed in the mountains above California's Death Valley, leaving their distinctive trails behind them. But researchers have witnessed a thin layer of water freezing over the lake, before breaking into sheets the thickness of a window pane and nudging the rocks as they were blown by the breeze. “It’s a delight to be involved in sorting out this kind of...

(Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona) A rolling stone gathers no moss – but on Mars it can nevertheless cloak itself in mystery. This NASA image shows the track of a boulder that rolled across the Nili Fossae region of Mars. For now it is anyone's guess what set the rock in motion. This false-colour picture (click on it for higher resolution) was posted on 7 June to the Beautiful Mars Tumblr feed, a collection of high-resolution shots from the HiRISE camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. It shows dark, jagged tracks left in the soil by a lumpy boulder, probably...

Actively studied for 50 years, the rocks that mysteriously move around the dried lake bed playa in Death Valley, called the Racetrack, are yet to have an unquestionable explanation for their movement. ... In 1976 Robert Sharp and Dwight Carey diputed the ice-sheet theory. They analyzed the tracks and concluded because of track characteristics and the geometries of the tracks relative to each other that ice sheets could not have been involved in forming the tracks and moving the rocks. Sharp and Carey concluded due to the non-parallel nature and the crossing of some trails that it would be impossible...

By now, most of us know there is water on the moon. But did you know that it comes in three flavors and there is so much of it--158 billion gallons--that it could fill all of Seattle's water needs for three years? It turns out there is water all over the lunar landscape, which is rather astonishing since astronomers were convinced for such a long time that it was bone dry. Discovery.com and Space.com report this all changed when actual measurements were taken using the Mini-SAR and Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3 or "M-cubed") instruments on India's Chandrayaan-1 moon probe and...

Boulder, CO, USA – A geologist's sharp eyes and upset stomach has led to the discovery, and almost too-close encounter, with an otherworldly geological process operating in a remote corner of northern Chile's Atacama Desert. The sour stomach belonged to University of Arizona geologist Jay Quade. It forced him and his colleagues Peter Reiners and Kendra Murray to stop their truck at a lifeless expanse of boulders which they had passed before without noticing anything unusual. "I had just crawled underneath the truck to get out of the sun," Quade said. The others had hiked off to look around, as...

For years scientists have theorized about how large rocks — some weighing hundreds of pounds — zigzag across Racetrack Playa in Death Valley National Park, leaving long trails etched in the earth. Now two researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, have photographed these "sailing rocks" being blown by light winds across the former lake bed. Richard Norris and James Norris said the movement is made possible when ice sheets that form after rare overnight rains melt in the rising sun, making the hard ground muddy and slick. On Dec. 20, 2013, the...

<p>Death Valley, Calif., which is known for being the world’s hottest location, maxed out at a relatively chilly 89 degrees on Sunday. This temperature – nearly 30 degrees below average – was its coolest high temperature on record for the date by a whopping 15 degrees. The previous record of 104 was set in 1945.</p>