Death Valley Itineraries

Death Valley itineraries

Death Valley is one of the best "drive-through" parks in the country. You can easily spend several days just cruising from one natural wonder to another.

It's hot in Death Valley much of the year, so you'll want to do much of your sightseeing early and late in the day, especially if you're visiting in the scorching summer. Don't miss sunrise at Zabriskie Point, just a 10-minute drive from the Furnace Creek Village tourist complex. Sunset there is spectacular, too, with a different part of the landscape lit up.

One day: If you have just one day and aren't up for much hiking, base yourself at the centrally located Furnace Creek Ranch or the nearby Furnace Creek Inn. Start early in the morning with the three-mile drive to Zabriskie Point, take in the view and continue another three miles to 20-Mule Team Canyon, where one of the best scenic drives in the park leads past a jaw-dropping panorama of bizarre, deeply eroded badlands pocked with mining tunnels burrowed by borax prospectors.

Backtrack to Furnace Creek and drive 20 miles south on Highway 178 to Badwater, the lowest point in North America at 282 feet below sea level. A boardwalk leads visitors onto the white-as-snow salt pan. On the way back, have a look at Devil's Golf Course, an eerie flat covered in lumps and spires of crystalline salts.

Then explore the nine-mile Artist's Drive, a one-way, roller-coaster road weaving through colorful rock formations including Artist's Palette, where minerals stain the rocks astonishing shades of green, yellow, blue and pink.

You can do all that before lunch, which you can eat at any of five restaurants (some open seasonally) in the Furnace Creek area. Afterward, bone up on Death Valley history and geology at the Death Valley Museum in the national park visitor center and the nearby Borax Museum.

In late afternoon, make a side trip to Harmony Borax Works, where an interpretive trail explains how the "white gold of the desert" was mined and processed. Stovepipe Wells, a secondary tourist center, is 20 miles up the road. Just past its motel/gas station complex is Mosaic Canyon, where you'll want to hike in to see walls of pure marble striated in hues of off-white, gray, brown and rose.

Then drive back to the Mesquite Flat Dunes for some frolicking in the sand at the end of the day.

More time: Add a day or two, and you'll fall more completely under Death Valley's spell. A tour of Scotty's Castle, a historic 1920s mansion 50 miles northwest of Furnace Creek, can be combined with a stop at Ubehebe Crater, a spectacular volcanic pit smeared with vibrant color. You'll need a high-clearance vehicle to explore Titus Canyon, with its spectacular view and rock formations, and Racetrack Playa, a dry lake bed where boulders wiggled by the winds of time have left long, mysterious tracks in the earth.

Beyond these well-known sites lie ghost towns, the ruins of old mines and a thousand and one other places where you most likely will be the only visitor.