Adiabatic Heating Furnace Creek at Death Valley National Park holds the record for hottest place on Earth. In 1913, the spot hit 134 degrees Fahrenheit! The park is home to Badwater Basin, the lowest point in North America, which is 282 feet below sea level. Death Valley is just 85 miles from Mount Whitney, the High […]
Nevada Has a Glacier As we’ve learned over the past month, Nevada boasts remarkable natural splendor. With huge mountains, spectacular canyons, world-class lakes, and expansive deserts, the state has more beauty than its reputation might suggest. Visiting the Silver State, one leaves with the notion that this area is an unheralded jewel. Following this trend,
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Fat Bear Week Katmai National Park in Alaska is a massive tract, larger than Connecticut. It’s home to one of the most alien locations on the planet: The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes. The result of the largest volcanic eruption by volume in the 20th century, the valley is strewn with ash, in some places as
Ile Moyenne, a Voluntary Robinson Crusoe, and the World’s Smallest National Park Please Respect the Tortoises. They are probably older than you. — Sign on Moyenne Island About 800 nautical miles east of Africa, 115 islands dot the Indian Ocean, forming an archipelago named Seychelles. Named after a minister of Louis XV, the islands had never
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The Dawnland Dedicated to Sloane Acadia For at least the last 12,000 years, Indigenous Americans have inhabited a region of the Atlantic Coast, including Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and parts of Quebec. The people called this land Wabanakik. A group of nations – the Maliseet, Mi’kmaq, Passamaquoddy, Abenaki, and
Guadalupe Peak Redux – Texas’ High Point Around 300 million years ago, western Texas and southeastern New Mexico were covered by an inland sea, called the Delaware Basin. Over time, a reef developed around the edge of the water. In these systems, calcium carbonate from organisms with shells forms limestone rock. Sometime during the Cenozoic
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An Ancient Walk to Rewrite History Since the 1970s, the predominant theory on the habitation of North America hinges on a land bridge from Asia. Approximately 13,000-16,000 years ago, near the end of the last Ice Age, climatic conditions precipitated a strip of land between Siberia and Alaska, called the Beringia land bridge. This theory
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White Sands Nestled between the San Andreas Mountains to the west and the Sacramento Mountains to the east lies the Tularosa Basin. Today, Tularosa is an endorheic basin, which means no water outflows from its cupping contours via rivers or oceans. In these types of basins, water pools internally in swamps or lakes. Since the Tularosa
Home of the Bat I thought it was a volcano—but then I’d never seen one…I had seen plenty of prairie whirlwinds during my life on the range, but this thing didn’t move. It seemed to stay in one spot near the ground—but the top kept spinning upward. I watched maybe a half-an-hour, and being about
