Temperature Tourism - A Vision of the Future?

I grew up close to California’s Death Valley - now America’s largest national park - and have been camping and exploring there since I was old enough to walk. It’s one of the places that helped to inspire me to become a photographer and I still revere it as one of the most hauntingly beautiful places on earth, awash in vibrant earth tones, bathed in silence and baked by the sun. AlpenImage’s database is filled with years of  pictures of its sand dunes, salt flats, eroded canyons and vibrant wildflowers. 

Last summer, however, I returned to photograph a different face of the park: the forbidding heat and quirky phenomena of “Temperature Tourism,” illustrating an evocative essay in Alta Magazine by writer Chris Colin.

Colin begins the article describing air-conditioned bus and carloads of tourists who visit the park not nearly as much for it natural grandeur as for bragging rights that they had experienced and survived the hottest place on earth, where the map abounds with morbid names like the Funeral Mountains, Last Chance Range, Badwater, Dante’s Vista, Hell’s Gate and Desolation Canyon. They come in the summer, a time when temperatures have spiked as high as 134 degrees fahrenheit and mop their brows as they snap selfies amid heat waves on the salt pans and line up beside a famed thermometer outside the visitors center at Furnace Creek. 

I have even been a temperature tourist myself. Years ago, I photographed the Badwater 135, one of the world’s most masochistic foot races - held in the summer - that started at Badwater, (elevation -242 feet) the lowest place in North America and hottest spot in the park, and proceeded over two desert mountain ranges to the summit of 14,505-foot Mount Whitney, highest summit in the lower 49 states. At one point my assistant Kenny Lloyd almost managed to fry an egg on the pavement. The pictures are a portrait of self-inflicted misery. 

But as Colin points out in a lyric description of climate change and global warming, this attraction may be losing its allure as temperatures around the world are soaring to record-breaking levels. 

Is Death Valley a vision of the future for most of the now-habitable world? 

You can read the story in the current edition of Alta here: 

https://www.altaonline.com/dispatches/a42110971/living-death-valley-heat-records-chris-colin/