Death Valley Ca

It's triple-digit hot about five months of the year. There is no doctor, dentist or drugstore, no fast food or video store. No barbershop, beauty salon, movie theater. The nearest shopping is an hour's drive away in Pahrump, Nev., a town with two stoplights. The closest high school is 45 miles from here in Beatty, Nev. Las Vegas, the next city of any size, is more than two hours by car. It takes a certain kind of person to thrive here. Kathleen Bankston is one.

The tiny Devil's Hole pupfish, found only in a small, deep pool in the desert near Death Valley, has been teetering on the brink of extinction for years. In the spring of 2006 there were only 38 of them, down from roughly 500 in the mid-1990s. The reasons for the decline are unclear. But government scientists trying to reverse the trend appear to be enjoying a bit of success.

Death Valley and Panamint Valley views are awesome from the summit of Wildrose Peak. The 9,064-foot peak in the middle of the Panamint Mountains beckons the hiker with a well-maintained trail and glorious views coming and going. In summer, when temperatures climb to more than 110 degrees on the floor of Death Valley, Wildrose Peak remains a pleasant place to walk. The peak and upper parts of the trail are snowbound in winter. The trail head alone is worth the trip.

Relying on new leads from Air Force experts, crews looking for famed aviator Steve Fossett plan to comb a rugged area near Death Valley by air and foot, authorities said in Carson City. Gary Derks, the state Department of Public Safety official in charge of the search, said the Air Force analyzed images picked up by radar and satellite that could be Fossett's plane.

Funeral Mountains, Starvation Canyon, Coffin Peak, Last Chance Range--all places in a piece of desert called Death Valley. I was nervous just making the reservation. Luckily my destination was the park's Furnace Creek Inn, where a swimming pool, tennis courts, golf course and elegant accommodations awaited--Death Valley's answer to the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite.

Sometimes a person needs to hunker down in a place that dwarfs headlines and silences cell phones. You don't have to be a survivalist to understand that, though I did think about renting a Hummer to make me invincible on a trip earlier this month to Death Valley National Park, about 300 miles northeast of L.A. On two previous visits, I had seen all the popular, easy-to-reach sights, including the sand dunes near Stovepipe Wells, Scotty's Castle and Zabriskie Point.

As they crossed the finish line, some of the runners hobbled and hallucinated. Others gave in to pain or sleep. They had just covered 135 miles in temperatures reaching 127 degrees over some of the most unforgiving terrain anywhere. If the searing heat and distance weren't enough, consider that they also had to traverse a course that climbed 8,653 feet. They used words like burn and torture and hell to describe the experience.

Pam Reed crossed the finish line of the 135-mile Badwater UltraMarathon Wednesday afternoon, sat down, vomited and yawned. Chalk up another one for the mother of five from Tucson. Ending the brutal footrace on the eastern flank of Mt. Whitney, Reed clocked in at 28 hours, 26 minutes, 52 seconds -- about 24 minutes ahead of the second finisher.

An Ohio man died of exposure while trying to cross a section of Death Valley National Park, a park spokesman said. Patrick David Hodges' body was discovered less than a mile from his car. It was Hodges' third try at hiking the difficult section known as the "saltpan," Ranger Mike Rondas said. On his most recent attempt, Hodges, 40, failed to complete the 20-mile hike after he ran out of water and suffered exposure.

It seems almost a contradiction in terms, particularly when you hike out to the old Harmony Borax Works--a rock salt landscape as tortured as you'll ever find. A park? Surely if the notion of a park was ever mentioned to one of the rough drivers of the 20-mule-team borax wagons that crossed Death Valley, the response would be unprintable in a family newspaper. Yet a park it now is. After years of acrimonious debate, the 1994 U.S.

The inevitable question is why. That's what people really want to know. Why would a 45-year-old mother of two who otherwise lives comfortably in upscale Hidden Hills choose to run 135 miles through one of the hottest places on Earth, without sleep, in July, during a heat wave that has left most Southern Californians uncomfortably sitting on their living room sofas?

THE silence almost hums here. I hear the quietest things: the wind traveling across the desert floor, the echo of a raven's caw returning from a distant mountain. It reminds me that Death Valley is a place of extremes: hottest, driest, lowest. At this moment, perhaps quietest. The rains of 2004 brought different extremes: record rainfall, flash floods, unparalleled wildflowers and millions of visitors. But the desert is rediscovering its equilibrium.

If Death Valley isn't vast enough, mean enough, hot enough or bad enough to make dehydrated hikers start hallucinating, sculptures at the Goldwell Open Air Museum near Rhyolite, Nev., created by a gang of artists from Belgium fill the bill -- and don't fade from view. I am the penguin: To conjure the spirit of Frank "Shorty" Harris, artist Fred Bervoets made a two-dimensional steel cutout, above, of the early 20th century prospector who stood just 5 feet, 4 inches tall.

On Aug. 3, 1977, Al Arnold began running in the 135-degree heat of Death Valley, the world's highest recorded temperature that year. The air scalded his lungs like a blow-dryer; the rubber soles on his tennis shoes began melting; sweat dried before it could cool his skin. Still, Arnold ran. After 84 hours, the 49-year-old from Walnut Creek had completed the 146 miles of roadway from Badwater, the country's low point at 252 feet below sea level, to the top of 14,497-foot Mt.

In the midst of the most spectacular wildflower bloom people here can remember -- and a crush of tourists to match -- conditions in this usually desolate place have come to this: Some park rangers are fleeing to Las Vegas for peace and quiet. Record rains have remade Death Valley this spring into a showplace of desert golds, brown-eyed evening primroses, gravel ghosts and desert stars. It is also a place where fistfights have broken out among customers waiting in long lines at gas pumps.

Here in the desert, where the ruthless sun punishes even the scorpions, a yellow school bus is delivering its delicate afternoon cargo. Exhausted children in T-shirts and shorts are sleeping on the vinyl seats or staring out the windows as the bus bounces along a rocky dirt road toward a colony of beat-up trailers and mobile homes 30 miles from school. A thermometer above the dashboard reads 104 degrees inside the cab -- and that's with the air conditioner running.

A hot wind buffets Peter Schulze and his girlfriend, Ingrid Luedke, as they read a digital thermometer. It's 120 degrees at 5:30 in the afternoon, and these Germans wonder why they're vacationing in this blistering, blowing heating duct known as Death Valley. "I was afraid of coming here, because of the heat, and because of the name of this place," Luedke said. "This is like standing in a hair dryer. This place is very impressive, but it's not very nice."

The tiny Devil's Hole pupfish, found only in a small, deep pool in the desert near Death Valley, has been teetering on the brink of extinction for years. In the spring of 2006 there were only 38 of them, down from roughly 500 in the mid-1990s. The reasons for the decline are unclear. But government scientists trying to reverse the trend appear to be enjoying a bit of success.

Pam Reed crossed the finish line of the 135-mile Badwater UltraMarathon Wednesday afternoon, sat down, vomited and yawned. Chalk up another one for the mother of five from Tucson. Ending the brutal footrace on the eastern flank of Mt. Whitney, Reed clocked in at 28 hours, 26 minutes, 52 seconds -- about 24 minutes ahead of the second finisher.

It was 6 a.m. and already hot as a blast furnace when Pam Reed took her place at the starting line to begin the 2002 Badwater UltraMarathon, a punishing 135-mile footrace through the blistering heart of Death Valley. The 100-pound mother of five broke away from her 79 competitors at a pace that had male veterans shaking their heads. A woman could never keep that up, they said, fully expecting her to soon collapse.