What are the fascinating — and also dangerous — aspects of Death Valley National Park? How does visiting a stark desert landscape give us perspective about our place in the world?

Steve Hall is a multi-award-winning documentary filmmaker and a seasoned adventure hiker renowned for his extensive explorations of Death Valley National Park.

• What’s special about Death Valley National Park?


• What are some of the iconic places to visit?


• The dangers of Death Valley


• Solo adventures and challenges


• Dark skies and star gazing


• Legends and history


• Conservation and visitor etiquette

You can find Steve’s hiking videos of Death Valley and other places at YouTube.com/stevehallDV. The Death Valley National Park website has lots more info.

You can find pictures and notes, as well as book recommendations on Death Valley here.

You can find Death Valley, A Thriller, by J.F. Penn, here.

Transcript of the interview

Jo: Hello travelers. I’m thriller author, J.F. Penn, and today I’m here with Steve Hall. Hi Steve.

Steve: Hi Jo. It’s great to be talking to you today.

Jo: Yes, just a little introduction. Steve is a multi-award-winning documentary filmmaker and a seasoned adventure hiker renowned for his extensive explorations of Death Valley National Park, which we’re talking about today. Let’s start with the basics.

Where is Death Valley in the world and what drew you to it initially?

Steve: Great questions. You know, it’s great to be talking with you about Death Valley National Park—of course, my favorite national park to visit. Death Valley is part of the Northern Mojave Desert, and it’s located right along the California–Nevada border.

It’s kind of situated in between Las Vegas to the east and the Sierra Nevada mountains off to the west. It is the largest national park in the lower 48 states. It actually has the great size of 3.4 million million acres, and it’s 140 miles in length, going from the bottom of the park all the way up to the top in the north. So it’s quite expansive.

<figure class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_3278" style="display: block; margin: 0 auto;"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-3278">Death Valley National Park, Photo by J.F. Penn</figcaption></figure>

Well, it kind of started for me back in 1997 when I was with a group of friends on the way to the Grand Canyon. As we finished up our trip there, we had a couple of extra days on our way home. So I noticed on a map all these kind of scary-sounding names within Death Valley—locations such as the Devil’s Golf Course, the Devil’s Cornfield, the Funeral Mountains, Badwater—kind of all scary, foreboding-sounding places. I told my friends, “Why don’t we stop there? We have a little extra time and see what Death Valley is all about.” And that’s what we did.

We drove through the park and actually had a kind of scary experience right when we first crossed the park boundaries. My very first memory of crossing into the park was seeing an injured motorcyclist on the dirt just off the road. I guess he had taken a turn too fast or something, but he flew off his bike and was injured, and paramedics were attending to him. So that was my introduction to the park—seeing somebody badly injured.

But on that first trip, I visited some of the famous tourist destinations such as Badwater, Artist Palette, Zabriskie Point, and Devil’s Golf Course. So that kind of gave me a little taster or teaser of the park. Those are the same kinds of destinations that first-time park visitors are sent to.

Let’s just get a bit into what it looks like because you mentioned a few things there, like the Devil’s Golf Course. I went to Badwater. I went to the Artist Palette in my day trip when I visited. You also mentioned the Grand Canyon. So I feel like even Americans or anyone in the world who knows a little bit about America has heard of the Grand Canyon, has seen pictures of the Grand Canyon. In their minds, when they say “National Park in America,” that’s kind of what people have in their mind, I think, because that’s the most famous one.

What is different about Death Valley and those places that we mentioned? Why are they so evocative?

Steve: Well, anytime somebody thinks about American national parks—like what you mentioned—they might think about the big famous ones such as Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone. Those have sights that are just so famous.

When you walk out to the Grand Canyon for the first time and look at that sweeping vista, it’s so overwhelming and it’s captured well in photographs. The same thing with Yosemite, with the majestic waterfalls and Half Dome. When it comes to Death Valley, people might think of a bleak, lifeless desert, so it might not be the first destination that comes to their mind when they’re thinking about visiting a US national park.

Well, tell us what it looks like. Like the Artist’s Palette, for example. Why is it called the Artist’s Palette, and what makes it special?

Steve: Well, that is a very interesting and neat place to check out and explore.

<figure class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_3284" style="display: block; margin: 0 auto;"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-3284">Artists’ Palette, Death Valley. Photo by JFPenn</figcaption></figure>

It’s along a place that’s known as Artist Drive, which is a one-way loop road that comes off of Badwater Road. Artist Palette itself has some very colorful hills. It is basically what the name implies. You drive up to it, you get out and take a look, and you’re surrounded by these colorful badlands. Some of the minerals and different forces have created a variety of colors on display. It really does have just about every color you can imagine.

You look out and there are all these little canyons going in different directions, and there are hills that you can scramble up. Of course, it’s a photographer’s dream. Artist Palette has been featured in, for instance, a music video by the group Oasis—their video “Who Feels Love?” was filmed partly in Death Valley, and Artist Palette was one of the locations that they chose. It’s a very famous spot.

Jo: Yeah, and really beautiful in different lights. I imagine you’ve obviously visited at different times of day. I feel like I was only there for about 10 minutes, but even then you can get all kinds of different shades in the rocks, as you said.

Let’s talk about Badwater Basin and, I guess, the salty areas.

Talk about those salt flats down there, and I guess why it’s also called Death Valley, because the day I was there, it was winter—it was November—and it was still damn hot.

Steve: Yeah, so Badwater itself is probably Death Valley’s most famous destination.

Around the Badwater Basin, there are some 200 square miles of salt flats. What makes it very special is that it’s the lowest spot in North America at minus 282 feet—282 feet below sea level. Badwater actually got its name because there was a surveyor in past times who brought his mule out and was in the area and led his mule up to the Badwater pool, which is a spring-fed little pool of water on the ground. The mule rejected it and refused to drink the salty water. So that’s why it got the name Badwater.

<figure class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_3283" style="display: block; margin: 0 auto;"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text" id="caption-attachment-3283">Badwater Basin Death Valley Photo by JFPenn</figcaption></figure>

Visiting it is a unique experience, especially for first-timers, because you can go out there and stand at that special spot, get your picture next to the sign, and you can also look up at the hillside nearby and see a sea level sign. You can visualize in your mind just how far underneath the ocean you would be if you were at sea level right there. There’s also an endemic snail that lives only at that location at Badwater, so that’s really special too.

And if you look across the salt flats, across the valley, you can see the Panamint Range. The highest summit there in the Panamints, as well as all of Death Valley, is Telescope