Death Valley's Desert Wonders Dazzle Visitors

DEATH VALLEY, Calif., April 11, 2010— -- Death Valley National Park is often called a land of extremes. The 3-million-acre park is the hottest, driest and lowest point in North America, and the varied terrain includes mountains, sand dunes and salt flats.

"It is probably the most dynamic, most diverse national park we have in the system. It's like a big, beautiful painting, and you could sit there and stare for hours picking out all the different pieces that the artist snuck all these little objects into," Death Valley National Park ranger Terry Baldino says.

Visitors are amazed with the vibrant shades of blues, reds, browns and blacks in the park's signature mountains and mudstone hills. Iron and other minerals give the mountains their dramatic hues.

The area was dubbed Death Valley during the early years of the California Gold Rush by a band of prospectors who got stuck while trying to find a shortcut to the San Francisco area. The name caught on, and today it still captures the imaginations of visitors to the region.

But for people who make their home in Death Valley, they consider the area to be anything but dead.

"It's full of living and breathing animals, wildflowers and people. It's not barren," says resident Barbara Durham, a member of the Timbisha Shoshone tribe, which has lived in the area for hundreds of years.

Most notable among the park's unique features are the expansive salt flats that cover nearly 200 square miles of the valley floor. The area, called Badwater Basin, is the lowest place in the Western Hemisphere.

Thousands of years ago, this area was a lake. Over time, the water evaporated, leaving behind a thick, crunchy layer of salt that resembles snow. Visitors are free to take an easy hike across the otherworldly landscape.

Majestic sand dunes are another fixture of this desert landscape. The Mesquite Flat sand dunes sit in a small area nearly surrounded by mountains. The dunes stand as tall as 150 feet high, and shadows on the rolling hills make them a great place to watch sunrises; sunsets create shadows on the sandy peaks.