The Ultimate Guide to Death Valley National Park

Some tips for visiting Death Valley National Park:

-The extreme temperatures here are no joke. It experiences the widest range of temperatures, from below freezing at night to triple digits during the day, of anywhere else in the country. It even holds the record for hottest temperature ever reported! Definitely avoid visiting in the summer, when scorching heat (and little shade) make it almost dangerous, and make sure to pack lots of sunscreen, water, warm sweaters and blankets. -Always be alert to your surroundings. Dangerous abandoned mine shafts, snakes, flash floods, wild burros (for real), and heat can be deceptively dangerous. -Make sure your car is in tip-top shape before driving here, and top off your gas often. There aren't a lot of places to stop off in the desert, and you definitely don't want to be stranded out here. -The remote location, relative low levels of light pollution and lack of trees and mountains give Death Valley some of the country's best stargazing. Bring binoculars or a telescope if you have them, but you can still see way more than normal with your naked eye.

Not far away from Death Valley National Park is a sobering piece of American History that is often forgotten. In 1942, after Pearl Harbor, the US government ordered the relocation and detainment of 110,000 Japanese Americans, most were native-born citizens, and the rest were prevented from obtaining citizenship by law, in internment camps such as Manzanar National Historic Site. Men, women, and children were forced from their homes into poorly-built barracks in the Death Valley desert, where they were subjected to the extreme heat and cold, crammed into small "apartments" inside the buildings with no privacy. The camp was roped off by barbed wire, and they were forbidden to leave. Rations were kept tight, and they were put to work for meager pay. As a result, Manzanar saw protests by the Japanese-Americans, some of which even turned deadly.

Despite the incredibly unjust conditions at Manzanar and other camps, those inside bonded together to start sports leagues, plant gardens, start a newspaper, raise hogs and chickens, make their own tofu, and more. There's a touching memorial at the cemetery, which is often draped in strings of origami. Bring along something to leave at the memorial for yourself, and make sure to spend time hearing the stories of those who were imprisoned here at the visitor center.

Artist's Drive and Palette is a gorgeous rock outcropping that gets its crazy colors from volcanic debris, cemented gravel, and deposits of other material (although imagining that it’s a literal paint palate is more fun). You can reach it by hiking or, if you’re so inclined, by car.

Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes are the easiest dunes in the park to access, and they're the only ones that allow sandboarding! While shorter than the Eureka Dunes, they're broader, covering more area, and the region's mesquite trees have anchored the sand into place.

Imagine walking through a field of sand dunes in an arid landscape, and experiencing an almost-unbelievable phenomenon: singing sand. Alright, maybe it's more like a boom or a squeak or a dull roar, depending on the conditions, but in some places in the desert, sand can actually emit a 450 hertz frequency that can actually be quite loud, and sometimes even physically felt. The best place to hear singing sand in Death Valley National Park is at Eureka Dunes. The dunes are only 3 miles long and 1 mile wide, but they're the tallest in California (and maybe the entire country), reaching up to 680 feet tall. They're located in a remote basin in the north end of the park. If you climb to the top of them and shuffle your way down, you can hear the distinctive sound: the National Park Service describes it as sounding like "the bass note of a pipe organ or the distant drone of an airplane."

Then visit Racetrack Playa and witness the mysterious Sailing Stones. The rocks at the Racetrack Playa in Death Valley move all on their own. Scientists know that for sure, you can even see the trails they leave behind. What remains a mystery is exactly how the stones do it, the more imaginative explanations involve aliens, while others theorize that magnets might somehow be involved. Current studies point to a phenomena that has ice floes forming around the rocks at night under specific conditions, which helps them slide along the desert floor as the wind pushes them. But, when it's all said and done, no one has actually seen the rocks move on their own. Oh, and if you do visit, don't steal the Sailing Stones (which researchers have named things like "Karen" and "Nancy")...it's illegal, and it hinders important research!