50 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 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Death Valley National Park straddles the border between which two states?
California and Nevada
Most of it lies in California east of the Sierra Nevada; small parts spill over into Nevada.
Q 02Death Valley holds which trio of superlatives among US national parks?
Hottest, driest and lowest
It is also the largest national park in the contiguous United States and the fifth-largest overall, bigger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined.
Q 03Badwater Basin, the lowest point in North America, lies how far below sea level?
282 feet
Only Argentina's Laguna del Carbón is lower in the Western Hemisphere; Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the lower 48, is just 85 miles away.
Q 04What air temperature, recorded at Furnace Creek on 10 July 1913, is the highest ever measured on Earth?
134 °F
A 136 °F reading from Libya in 1922 was later thrown out; the average July high there is 117 °F.
Q 05How much rain falls at Badwater in an average year?
About 1.5 inches
Some years register nothing at all; the surrounding mountains can get over 15 inches, and rare storms bring flash floods that remodel the landscape.
Q 06Why is Death Valley so dry?
Mountain ranges wring the moisture out of Pacific air
The Sierra Nevada, Argus and Panamint ranges each force air upward, in what climatologists call a rain shadow.
Q 07What is the highest point in the park?
Telescope Peak
In the Panamint Range, it rises more than 11,000 feet above Badwater in about 15 miles, one of the greatest vertical rises in the lower 48.
Q 08How did the place get its grim name?
A woman in a lost 1849 wagon party said 'Goodbye' to it as they left
Only one member of the Bennett-Arcane party actually died there; they ate their oxen and burned their wagons to cook the meat at what is now Burnt Wagons Camp.
Q 09The lost 1849 party stumbled into the valley while looking for what?
A shortcut to the California gold fields
About 100 wagons left the Old Spanish Trail; William Lewis Manly's book Death Valley in '49 told the story and got the ancient lake named after him.
Q 10Which Native people regained 7,500 acres of homeland at Furnace Creek under a 2000 act?
The Timbisha
Formerly called Panamint Shoshone, they arrived about 1,000 years ago and migrated between valley-floor winter camps and mountain pine-nut harvests; a community remains at Furnace Creek.
Q 11The borax refined at the Harmony Borax Works in the 1880s was mainly used to make what?
Soap and industrial products
William Tell Coleman's plant ran from about 1883 to 1888; borax was the only ore ever mined profitably in the valley over the long term, and by the late 1920s the area led the world in it.
Q 12The famous 'twenty-mule teams' that hauled borax to the railhead actually consisted of what?
18 mules and two horses
They pulled 10-ton wagons 165 miles to Mojave at two miles an hour, a 30-day round trip.
Q 13The 20-Mule Team Borax brand was used to promote which long-running radio and TV programme?
Death Valley Days
Q 21Ubehebe Crater in the north of the park was created by what kind of eruption?
A steam explosion when magma met groundwater
Geologists call the resulting pits maars; the half-mile-wide crater is 500 to 777 feet deep and 2,000 to 7,000 years old.
Q 22Zabriskie Point is named after an executive of which business?
Pacific Coast Borax
Christian Zabriskie was its vice-president; the badlands there are sediments of Furnace Creek Lake, which dried up five million years ago, long before Death Valley existed.
Q 23Which Italian director's 1970 film is titled Zabriskie Point?
Francis Marion Smith's company created the trade name after buying out Coleman in 1890; it also sold Boraxo hand soap.
Q 14Which president proclaimed Death Valley National Monument on 11 February 1933?
Herbert Hoover
He set aside almost two million acres; Congress reopened the area to mining within months.
Q 15Which 1994 law expanded the monument by 1.3 million acres and made it a national park?
California Desert Protection Act
That made it the largest national park in the lower 48; a 2019 act added another 35,292 acres.
Q 16Roughly what share of the park is designated wilderness?
More than 93 percent
UNESCO also made it the core of a desert biosphere reserve a decade before it became a national park.
Q 17Scotty's Castle in Grapevine Canyon was actually built and paid for by whom?
Chicago millionaire Albert Mussey Johnson
'Death Valley Scotty' had conned Johnson into backing a fake gold mine; the two became friends and Johnson played along, calling himself Scott's banker.
Q 18Why was Scotty's Castle closed to the public from 2015 onward?
Severe flood damage, then a 2021 fire
The October 2015 flood wrecked the site and the 2021 fire destroyed the historic garage used as a visitor center; the closure was planned to run through at least 2026.
Q 19The Racetrack Playa is famous for what?
Rocks that leave trails as they slide across it
In 2014 researchers watched thin sheets of melting ice, pushed by light winds, shove the stones along at up to 80 mm a second.
Q 20What did a 2014 study find actually moves the Racetrack's sailing stones?
Thin sheets of ice pushed by wind
The old idea was wind alone over slick wet mud; the ice panels moved rocks in winds of only 4 to 5 metres per second.
Michelangelo Antonioni
Its soundtrack features Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead.
Q 24George Lucas used parts of Death Valley in 1977 to stand in for which fictional planet?
Tatooine
The desert doubled for Luke Skywalker's home world in the original Star Wars.
Q 25Which president added Devils Hole, sole home of the Devils Hole pupfish, to the monument in 1952?
Harry Truman
The pool across the state line may be the smallest habitat on Earth holding an entire vertebrate species; a spring 2025 count found just 38 fish.
Q 26The Supreme Court case Cappaert v. United States established what about Devils Hole?
Its 1952 protection implicitly reserved its groundwater
Nearby farm pumping in the 1960s and 70s had been dropping the water below the tiny shelf where the fish feed and spawn.
Q 27The Death Valley pupfish, a relic of wetter times, descends from fish that swam in from which river?
The Colorado
They came via a long-vanished chain of rivers and lakes and now survive in two spots: Salt Creek and Cottonball Marsh.
Q 28What name do geologists give the Ice Age body of water that once filled Death Valley?
Lake Manly
It was the last stop for water draining the Great Basin, so it grew saturated with dissolved minerals; it began drying up 10,500 years ago, leaving the salt pans.
Q 29How large is the biggest salt pan in the park?
About 200 square miles
It runs 40 miles from the Ashford Mill site to the Salt Creek Hills and is rich in mineral salts.
Q 30Which dune field, just east of Stovepipe Wells, is the easiest to reach from a paved road?
Mesquite Flat
It is mostly quartz sand; the tallest dunes in the park, and some of the tallest in North America, are 50 miles north in Eureka Valley.