Death Valley National Park

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The forbidding landscape of California’s Death Valley National Park is best known for its extremes. Summer daytime temperatures average 115° Fahrenheit, with little added relief after sunset. Mountain peaks as high as 11,000 feet snake through a sandy, sun-burnt landscape, which includes the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere: 282 feet below sea level. With little more than an inch-and-a-half of rain each year, springtime blooms are generally modest at best. But this year’s torrential rainfalls, which devastated cliff-dwelling homes in Los Angeles, topped six inches in Death Valley—small by most standards, but enough to create an explosion of life and color unprecedented in this century.