Exploring Death Valley National Park: Earth’s Most Alien Landscape

Filmmakers have used Death Valley as a stand-in for Mars. The first season of The Mandalorian filmed there. Robinson Crusoe on Mars used it to represent another world entirely. This isn't coincidence — it's because Death Valley contains landscapes so geologically extreme, so visually unlike anything in ordinary experience, that the mind reaches instinctively for another planet as a reference point.

Standing in it, you understand why.

Begin at Badwater Basin, the lowest point in North America at 282 feet below sea level. What stretches before you is nearly 200 square miles of salt flat — brilliant white, cracked into geometric polygons by cycles of rain and evaporation that have been repeating here for thousands of years. The silence is absolute. The scale is disorienting. It is the floor of an ancient inland sea, drained to this. Twenty thousand years ago, glacial meltwater filled this valley to a depth of 600 feet. What remains is the salt it left behind.

Move north to the Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes and the landscape shifts entirely. Dunes rise in sweeping curves against a backdrop of snow-capped mountains. At sunrise or sunset, the light does something extraordinary to the sand — the shadows deepen, the ridgelines sharpen, and the whole scene takes on a quality that photographers spend their careers chasing.

At Zabriskie Point, you're looking at nine million years of geological history rendered in color. The badlands here — golden, brown, and rust-red — are the compressed sediment of an ancient lakebed, sculpted by rare rainfall into ridges and gullies that glow magnificently at the ends of the day. The philosopher Michel Foucault once called a visit to Zabriskie Point the greatest experience of his life. The landscape has that kind of effect on people.

All of this exists within the boundaries of a single national park — the largest in the contiguous United States — alongside volcanic craters, canyon walls striped with mineral color, and mountain peaks that rise to 11,000 feet just miles from the lowest point in the western hemisphere.

What Death Valley offers the traveler who is paying attention is a direct encounter with geological time — the accumulated evidence of ancient seas, volcanic eruptions, tectonic forces, and thousands of years of wind and sun. It is a landscape that has no interest in being comfortable or convenient, and that honesty is precisely what makes it so compelling.

Our March women's hiking trip moves through this terrain over four days. Reach out to learn more or reserve your spot.