Zabriskie Point — scenic viewpoint
Image by Abhardphoto from Pixabay

Zabriskie Point

  • Elevation692 m
  • 2 min read
  • 36.420° N 116.811° W

Interesting facts

  • Ancient lakeshore muds near Zabriskie Point preserve tracks of extinct camels, mastodons, wild horses, carnivores and birds, alongside fossil grasses and reeds.
  • The Furnace Creek Formation is the main source of the borate minerals mined in Death Valley, concentrated by hot springs and altered volcanic rock.
  • Many of the badlands' colours come from weathering and from hot mineral waters that chemically altered the sediments.
  • The dark rock capping some of the ridges is lava from eruptions about three to five million years ago.
  • Manly Beacon honours William L. Manly, who with John Rogers led a stranded party of forty-niners out of Death Valley during the 1849 Gold Rush.
  • The badlands stood in for the surface of Mars in the 1964 film Robinson Crusoe on Mars.
  • Scenes of Stanley Kubrick's 1960 epic Spartacus were filmed here, with Peter Ustinov riding a mule toward an Egyptian mine.
  • Antonioni's film Zabriskie Point has a soundtrack featuring Pink Floyd, the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia and the Rolling Stones.
  • Views of Manly Beacon and Red Cathedral were digitally reworked to create the planet Arvala-7 in the first season of The Mandalorian.
  • The philosopher Michel Foucault described an LSD trip he took at Zabriskie Point in 1975 as the greatest experience of his life.

Why it is worth it

Zabriskie Point is a short climb above Highway 190 in Death Valley, and from the top a whole landscape of eroded badlands spreads out below: rippled hills of pale gold and darker brown, cut by countless gullies, with the sharp fin of Manly Beacon standing above them and the white floor of Death Valley and the Panamint Range beyond. Few places in the American West show erosion so nakedly — there is no vegetation to soften the folds, so every ridge and channel is visible.

The hills are the remains of an ancient lake. Between roughly nine and five million years ago a body of water known to geologists as Furnace Creek Lake collected muds, salts, gravel washed from surrounding mountains and ash from volcanic eruptions; these layers, more than 1,500 metres thick in all, make up the Furnace Creek Formation. After the lake dried up, tectonic movement tilted the beds and rain began to carve them, a process that continues with every rare storm. Manly Beacon may owe its survival to a harder cap of volcanic rock that has protected it while the softer mudstones around it wore away.

The viewpoint takes its name from Christian Brevoort Zabriskie, a vice-president and general manager of the Pacific Coast Borax Company in the early twentieth century, the firm famous for hauling borax out of the valley with twenty-mule teams. The landscape has long attracted filmmakers: Michelangelo Antonioni named his 1970 film after it, and the point appears in photographs for U2's album The Joshua Tree. Sunrise is the classic hour, when low light rakes across the ridges and the colours shift minute by minute.

Getting there

Zabriskie Point lies in Death Valley National Park, California, about 5 miles (8 km) southeast of the Furnace Creek Visitor Center on Highway 190. From the car park a paved path of about 400 metres leads up to the viewpoint. The nearest town outside the park is Pahrump, Nevada, about 78 km away in a straight line, and the nearest major airport is Harry Reid International Airport (LAS) in Las Vegas, about 154 km away; most visitors arrive by car.

Plan your visit

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Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in California 36The Most Beautiful Places in the United States 228The Most Spectacular Viewpoints in the United States 8The Most Beautiful Squares, Streets and Monuments in the United States 14The Most Spectacular Viewpoints 33The Most Beautiful Squares, Streets and Monuments 173

From the encyclopaedia

Zabriskie Point is a part of the Amargosa Range located east of Death Valley in Death Valley National Park in California, United States, noted for its erosional landscape. It is composed of sediments from Furnace Creek Lake, which dried up 5 million years ago—long before Death Valley came into existence.

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36.42000, -116.81111per Wikidata