Travel: Death Valley Delights

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But the most popular tourist spot in the valley is an incongruous architectural folly known as Scottys Castle. It's named after Walter Scott, a flamboyant prospector and veteran of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, who conned a millionaire Chicago insurance executive named Albert Johnson into grubstaking a worthless mine. Johnson may have been snookered, but he was soon won over by the beauty and restorative qualities of the valley; the dry heat and clean air worked wonders with his asthma. In the late 1920s Johnson built a $2 million Spanish Colonial "vacation" hacienda with a lovely Gothic music room, handmade Spanish tiles, Italian and Mexican antiques and innovative solar-powered electrical and hot-water systems.

The other major man-made attraction is the Furnace Creek Inn itself, built in the 1920s at the base of the Funeral Mountains. With travertine walkways, red-tiled roof and elegantly understated European decor, the inn soon attracted politicians, businessmen and, in due time, the Hollywood crowd, who used Death Valley as a backdrop for hundreds of movies, television shows and commercials.

Today it's Death Valley's natural beauty that draws most visitors and brings them back for more. Well-marked hiking trails offer endless opportunities to experience at close range the raw and diverse geography created by erosion, volcanism and shifting tectonic plates. If you start at Zabriskie Point (a setting for Michelangelo Antonioni's film and the best place in the valley to watch the sun rise), you can trek down 2.8 miles past pale blue-green desert holly shrubs, sun-drenched yellow badlands, the fluted walls of Red Cathedral and the pinnacle of stately Manley Beacon and end up at the base of Golden Canyon--named for its radiance in the morning light.

For a change of scene, you can saunter along the lengthy peaks of the Sand Dunes near Stovepipe Wells, where desert winds have deposited grains of mountain quartz in a beach-like expanse that covers 15 sq. mi. Or you can visit Devil's Golf Course, where wind and rain have shaped the silt of ancient saltwater lakes into surreal crystallized salt pinnacles. And there's no place better to observe the tectonic forces that shaped Death Valley than at Badwater, the lowest place in the valley (and on the continent), where a salt-and-silt bog hundreds of feet below sea level rises abruptly to 11,049-ft. Telescope Peak 15 miles west.

Other sites are best enjoyed by car, like Ubehebe Crater, where winds scream over the rim of a stunning half-mile-wide, 500-ft.-deep crater formed 4,000 years ago, when rising molten basalt met cold, shallow groundwater. The mixture exploded violently, blowing off a massive lid of sedimentary rock and blasting cinders over 6 sq. mi. The multihued rocks that ring the interior of the crater were used for location shots in the original 1977 Star Wars.