A few miles down the desolate strip that leads into California's Death Valley National Park, visitors can drive up to an automated kiosk, dash from the car and buy a $10 park pass to display on the dashboard.

But recently, when the words "Excessive Heat Warning!" headlined the park's daily report, displaying anything on a dashboard proves folly. Within 30 minutes, the pass has been rendered useless. It has fried in the midday sun, its edges charred, its text blackened beyond recognition.

"Your pass burned up? Well, that's how I know you paid," says park ranger Vicki Wolfe, tittering as she hands over a map. "The only ones who complain about that are the ones who actually stuck it in their windshield."

Lessons like that come quickly in this hottest, driest, lowest spot in North America. Maybe the cruelest spot, too, but certainly not the loneliest. Even during the height of the July and August scorchfest, when temperatures regularly topped 113 degrees, tourists streamed into the park, about 120 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The majority have come to simply experience the effects of triple digits on the psyche and to drive around snapping photos rather than strenuously hiking the arid canyons, mountains and dunes that make up the 3.3-million-acre park.

"We get a lot of Europeans this time of year," said Wolfe, explaining that while February through mid-April is Death Valley's peak season, many foreigners enjoy the thrill of being in the desert at its nastiest.

Nasty it is, though in an exhilarating what-the-heck-am-I-doing-here kind of way. Yeah, it's a dry heat, but who cares? The continent's hottest temperature ever (134 degrees) was recorded July 10, 1913, at what is now Furnace Creek Ranch — a series of cowering motel buildings and cottages where most summer visitors are sequestered. The tony Furnace Creek Inn, about a mile up the road, wisely closes for the summer.

This summer, temperatures hit a blistering 128 and 129 degrees on two days in July.

Information

Death Valley National Park: 760-786-3200 or www.nps.gov/deva

"After 120 degrees, it's all the same to me," says park ranger Athena Siqueiros, who proclaims she is used to weather extremes. "That's when I feel it in my eyelids, which quiver in the heat."

Eyelid-quivering heat indeed. Waves of stultifying air bombard from every angle, with skin, hair and clothes hot to the touch in seconds. Mouths reflectively open at the shock. Walking at such sites as the Harmony Borax Works, a once-thriving mining operation, grows tiresome after a few minutes. Appetites wane.

The heat of Death Valley is an unwieldy byproduct of its otherworldly geography, a low, narrow basin framed by mountain ranges. The sun blasts the desert floor, and the hot air rises. After it becomes trapped by the valley walls, it descends, only to be heated to an even greater extent.

The effects are far ranging, and the learning curve can be painful. Besides the general discomfort of sucking in superheated air, taking a picture leaves a welt if you touch the exposed metal on your camera. You can swim at the low-key (and entirely too sunny) pool at the ranch, but you sometimes must take your shoes off at water's edge to avoid burning your feet.

Oddly enough, no one seems to be complaining.

"What's not to love?" enthuses Chris Morgan, of Lone Pine, Calif. "It's my favorite park, there's nothing else like it." He's standing — and panting — in the Furnace Creek Visitor Center, which contains low-tech displays and killer air conditioning. "I had to feel this for myself. After 115 degrees, it gets a little hard to handle," says Morgan.

His travel companion, Hollie McGill, of Ventura, Calif., looks as if she's already had enough, but the two 32-year-olds jump back in the car and head about 18 miles south to Badwater Basin. At 282 feet below sea level, it's the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere. It could also be the brightest.

Badwater is the site of a lake that evaporated thousands of years ago, leaving a layer of blinding white table salt stretching to the horizon; a pond remains, though in the summer months it's an unimpressive if pungent puddle. Park rangers advise visitors to stay close to the boardwalk at the salt flat's edge, though few do. All should. After straying a couple of hundred feet onto the desert floor and becoming overwhelmed by the blistering glare, you'll wish you were under the boardwalk.

Nighttime brings little comfort. At 8:30 one night, it was still 111 degrees. About a dozen heads poke out of the ranch pool, but the crowd is weirdly muted. It's been a long, hot day, leading into a long, hot night (the daily low usually around 85 or higher). A steakhouse and a cafe serving diner-style food are packed with the Euro crowd, accustomed to eating later than the early-bird-special brigade.

Back at Badwater Basin, a nearly full moon is casting a surreal glow on the encroaching flats. The silence is complete. There are no coyotes howling into the night sky, no tourists puttering about.

But it's time to go. The eyelids have started to quiver.