DEATH VALLEY, Calif. (AP) — Hundreds of Europeans touring the American West and adventurers from around the U.S. are still being drawn to Death Valley National Park, even though the desolate region known as one of the Earth’s hottest places is being punished by a dangerous heat wave blamed for a motorcyclist’s death over the weekend.
French, Spanish, English and Swiss tourists left their air-conditioned rental cars this week to take photographs of the barren landscape so different than the snow-capped mountains and rolling green hills they know back home. American adventurers liked the novelty of it, even as officials at the park in California warned visitors to stay safe.
A long exposure image of the thermostat at the Furnace Creek Visitors Center taken just after 10:00 p.m., in Death Valley National Park, Calif., Sunday, July 7, 2024. (AP Photo/Ty ONeil)
“I was excited it was going to be this hot,” said Drew Belt, a resident of Tupelo, Mississippi, who wanted to stop in Death Valley as the place boasting the lowest elevation in the U.S. on his way to climb California’s Mount Whitney. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Kind of like walking on Mars.”
The searing heat wave gripping large parts of the U.S. also led to record daily high temperatures in Oregon, where it is suspected to have caused six deaths, the state medical examiner’s office said Tuesday. More than 161 million people around the U.S. were under heat alerts, especially in Western states.
Dozens of locations in the West and Pacific Northwest tied or broke previous heat records over the weekend and are expected to keep doing this week.
At Death Valley National Park, tourists queued for photos in front of a giant thermometer the National Park Service keeps near the visitor center. It’s not precise, registering the temperature anywhere from 1 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit higher than more modern instruments kept by the National Weather Service nearby, providing a more impressive reading for pictures.
A person uses an umbrella to block the sun while waiting to take a photo at the “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign Monday, July 8, 2024, in Las Vegas. (Wade Vandervort/Las Vegas Sun via AP)
““It’s not cited to be an official temperature sensor,” said Dan Berc, a warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Las Vegas.
“This is an incredibly popular place to be, as you can see from the visitors behind me,” supervisory park ranger Jeanette Jurado said Tuesday by the thermometer, which read 120 F (48.9 C). “But even in the wintertime, people might find that 80 degrees in December is unusual and worthy of taking a picture.”
An excessive heat warning was also in place for much of Washington and Oregon on Tuesday, with the potential for temperatures to reach up to 110 F (43.3 C) in areas, posing a major risk for heat-related illness,