Badwater  

Death Valley – Greetings from the hell!  
The air is flimmering. Air flickers. The Hades of the Greek legend world opens itself: Lava streams are steaming, and in the fire the sinner scorch. Dante’s vision of hell seems to become real in this part of the world. The first settlers, who went by this deadly valley on their way to California, believed they’d landed in the forecourt of hell. That’s why a peek, where you have a fantastic view over the Death Valley, is called Dante’s View. It’s a reminiscence on a play by the Italian dramatist. It is a view that robs one’s senses; a panorama like it cannot be imagined more opposite on this planet. Down in the valley you can “see” the heat, where the temperature in the summer reaches 55 degrees Celsius. On the other side one may not trust his eyes, there is a snow-covered mountain in the distance, the Mount Whitney. It’s the highest spot in the USA (without Alaska) and it reaches 4418 meters far into the deep-blue and cloudless sky, only 130 kilometers from Badwater, where in June 1913 88 meters under the sea level with 57 degrees Celsius the highest ever measured temperature in nature was registered. 

The Death Valley near the border to the US-state of Nevada offers a spectacular geological diversity: Canyons shining in all different colours, rugged rocks, gently waved sand dunes, drained saltcreeks, all of this can be found in the 8000 square kilometers large desert basin. It’s embedded in a National Park that is almost 200 kilometers in lenght and between 6 and 26 kilometers wide, to protect it against human destruction. 

The best way to enter this natural wonder is through the Furnace Creek oasis. The Visitor Center helps to discover the unusual flora and fauna or the geological special features. Hard to believe, but in the “valley of death” crawling beetles, speedy lizards, poisonous rattlesnakes live between and under desert grasses, creosote-shrubs or meager mesquite-trees or they bury themselves during the day in the damper and cooler subsoil. 

Over that there is a scenery, which attracts each year thousands of visitors: sharply edged salt crystals on Devil's Golf Course, the majestic enlighted Golden Canyon, the Twenty Mule Team Canyon, through which in earlier times borax - the “white gold” - was transported, the deep hollow of the Ubehebe Craters, the tower of Scotty's Castle and the golden-brown mud rock at the Zabriskie Point, which become famous with Michelangelo Antonioni’s movie in the seventies. 

And last but not least: Badwater, where Dusan Mravlje begins his torturing 217 kilometres of this years Badwater Ultramarathon through the heat hell of the Death Valley.