Death Valley National Park Trivia
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47 free Death Valley National Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Death Valley National Park trivia quiz covers the largest national park in the lower 48 and the hottest, driest and lowest of them all. Questions cover Badwater Basin at 282 feet below sea level, the 134 °F reading of 1913, the rain shadow that keeps it dry, Telescope Peak, the sailing stones of Racetrack Playa, Ubehebe Crater, Zabriskie Point, the dunes and the ancient Lake Manly. History runs from the Timbisha through the lost forty-niners who named the valley, the borax boom and its twenty-mule teams, Rhyolite and the Keane Wonder gold rush, Death Valley Scotty and his 'castle', Hoover's 1933 monument, the CCC camp that briefly held Japanese-American detainees, the 1994 California Desert Protection Act, Star Wars' Tatooine and the Supreme Court fight over the Devils Hole pupfish. Wildlife, plants and the park's dark skies round it out. Questions run from easy to expert with the difficulty shown on each one. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. If you enjoy this one, try our Yosemite and US National Parks quizzes next.
30 of 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Death Valley National Park straddles the border between which two states?
California and Nevada
California and Nevada. Nearly all of the park is in California, but one Nevada piece isn't joined to the rest at all: Devils Hole, 40 acres around a flooded cave inside a separate wildlife refuge.
Q 02Death Valley holds which trio of superlatives among US national parks?
Hottest, driest and lowest
Hottest, driest and lowest, yet after a rare wet winter the valley floor erupts in a 'superbloom', with swaths of wildflowers across ground that is usually bare.
Q 03Badwater Basin, the lowest point in North America, lies how far below sea level?
282 feet
282 feet. The name comes from a spring-fed pool beside the road, but the water isn't poisonous, just far too salty to drink, and snails and insects live in it happily.
Q 04Death Valley's 134 °F became the world heat record in 2012 after a 1922 reading from which country was struck off?
Libya
Libya. Its 136 °F reading at El Azizia stood for 90 years, until a World Meteorological Organization panel found that an untrained stand-in observer had probably misread the thermometer.
Q 05About how much rain falls on the floor of Death Valley in an average year?
About 2 inches
About 2 inches, and some years the gauge catches none at all. What does fall often comes in bursts that send flash floods down the canyons and remodel the landscape.
Q 06Why is Death Valley so dry?
Mountain ranges wring the moisture out of Pacific air
Mountain ranges wring the moisture out of Pacific air: each storm must climb range after range, dropping its rain and snow on the western slopes until little is left, an effect called a rain shadow.
Q 07What is the highest point in Death Valley National Park?
Telescope Peak
Telescope Peak stands more than two miles above the lowest ground in North America, which lies at its foot, one of the greatest vertical rises in the lower 48.
Q 08Which dunes are the tallest in California, rising about 680 feet above a remote valley floor?
Eureka Dunes
Eureka Dunes, in the park's far north. When dry sand avalanches down the steepest face the dune 'sings', a deep hum that has been compared to a distant propeller plane.
Q 09The lost wagon party of 1849 entered Death Valley looking for what?
A shortcut to the California gold fields
A shortcut to the California gold fields. Only one man died there, but as the survivors climbed out someone is said to have called 'Goodbye, Death Valley', and the name stuck.
Q 10Which people regained about 7,500 acres of their Death Valley homeland under a 2000 act?
The Timbisha
The Timbisha, a Shoshone people, had lived in the valley for centuries, yet the tribe won federal recognition only in the 1980s and had no land base in its homeland until the 2000 act.
Q 11The famous 'twenty-mule teams' that hauled Death Valley borax were really 18 mules and two what?
Horses
Horses. The two big 'wheelers' hitched nearest the wagons had the brute strength to start the heavy load rolling, and the eighteen mules ahead of them did the rest.
Q 12Which actor hosted the western series Death Valley Days in the mid-1960s, his last acting job?
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan. The borax-sponsored series was his final work as an actor: he left it in 1966 to run for governor of California, and won.
Q 13Which president proclaimed Death Valley a national monument in February 1933, weeks before leaving office?
Herbert Hoover
Q 21Michelangelo Antonioni's 1970 film is named after which Death Valley landmark?
Zabriskie Point
Zabriskie Point. Antonioni shot scenes among the badlands at the viewpoint, and years later U2 came to the same spot to photograph the cover of The Joshua Tree.
Q 22George Lucas filmed parts of the original Star Wars in Death Valley as which desert planet?
Tatooine
Tatooine. Tunisia provided the main sets for Luke Skywalker's home planet, but Death Valley supplied extra scenes for the 1977 film, and the crew came back for Return of the Jedi.
Q 23Which president added Devils Hole, home of a rare pupfish, to Death Valley National Monument in 1952?
Harry Truman
Herbert Hoover. His proclamation closed the land to new mining claims, but only briefly: Congress reopened the monument to prospectors that June.
Q 14Which 1994 law expanded Death Valley National Monument and made it a national park?
California Desert Protection Act
The California Desert Protection Act added 1.3 million acres to the old monument, and the same law turned Joshua Tree into a national park and created Mojave National Preserve.
Q 15About what share of Death Valley National Park is designated wilderness?
About 90 percent
About 90 percent: over 93% of the park is roadless wilderness, where the law bars cars, motorcycles and even bicycles, so most of Death Valley is open only to travel on foot or horseback.
Q 16Scotty's Castle in Grapevine Canyon was actually built and paid for by whom?
Chicago millionaire Albert Mussey Johnson
Chicago millionaire Albert Mussey Johnson built it as a holiday retreat. Walter Scott had conned him into backing a bogus gold mine, yet the two became friends and Johnson let 'Scotty' call the castle his own.
Q 17Why was Scotty's Castle closed to the public from 2015 onward?
Severe flood damage, then a 2021 fire
Severe flood damage, then a 2021 fire: a storm stalled over Grapevine Canyon in October 2015 and buried the grounds in mud, and the fire then destroyed the historic garage that served as the visitor center.
Q 18The Racetrack Playa is famous for what?
Rocks that leave trails as they slide across it
Rocks that leave trails as they slide across it. In 2014 researchers finally caught them moving: thin sheets of ice on a shallow winter pond break up and, pushed by light winds, shove the stones along.
Q 19What created Ubehebe Crater in northern Death Valley?
A steam explosion when magma met groundwater
A steam explosion when magma met groundwater: the blast hurled out shattered rock, and its dark debris still mantles the ground around the half-mile-wide crater.
Q 20The Badwater 135 ultramarathon starts in Death Valley and finishes at the trailhead to which mountain?
Mount Whitney
Mount Whitney: the course runs from the lowest point in North America to the foot of the highest peak in the lower 48, and it is staged in July, when the valley is at its hottest.
Harry Truman added the flooded cavern in 1952. It opens onto a vast aquifer, and big earthquakes as far away as Japan and Chile set its water sloshing like a bathtub.
Q 24What did the Supreme Court's Cappaert ruling establish about Devils Hole?
Its 1952 protection implicitly reserved its groundwater
Its 1952 protection implicitly reserved its groundwater: a nearby ranch's wells were dropping the pool below the rock shelf where the pupfish feed and spawn, so the 1976 ruling capped the pumping.
Q 25The Death Valley pupfish, a relic of wetter times, descends from fish that swam in from which river?
The Colorado
The Colorado: its fish are thought to have reached the valley through a chain of Ice Age rivers and lakes, and when those dried up the survivors were left stranded in a few desert creeks and marshes.
Q 26What name do geologists give the Ice Age body of water that once filled Death Valley?
Lake Manly
Lake Manly, named for a forty-niner who rescued his stranded party, was once hundreds of feet deep. After the storms of 2023-24 a shallow version came back for a few months, deep enough to kayak on.
Q 27About how large is the biggest salt pan in Death Valley National Park?
About 200 square miles
About 200 square miles of the valley floor. The crust is mostly ordinary table salt, left behind when the Ice Age lake that once filled the valley evaporated.
Q 28Which Death Valley dune field, just east of Stovepipe Wells, is the easiest to reach by paved road?
Mesquite Flat
Mesquite Flat's dunes sit right beside the highway, with a car park at their edge. That easy access drew film crews too: dune scenes for the Star Wars series were shot there.
Q 29Which gold-rush ghost town near Death Valley had a stock exchange, opera house and bottle house by 1907?
Rhyolite
Rhyolite boomed from 1905 with a three-storey bank and a house built of some 50,000 beer and liquor bottles, but its big mine shut in 1911 and within a few years the town was all but deserted.
Q 30Which cult leader was arrested in 1969 at Barker Ranch, a remote hideout now inside Death Valley National Park?
Charles Manson
Charles Manson was found hiding under a bathroom sink. The officers had come about a burned earthmover belonging to the monument and had no idea yet that they had caught a murder suspect.