Business Insider
Kids who live in Death Valley, California, enjoy the playground in the Cow Creek residential area.
Courtesy of Crystal Taylor
With average daytime temperatures of nearly 120 degrees in August, Death Valley is one of the hottest regions in the world.
More than 300 people call the area home, most of them employees of the National Park Service and local hotels.
Two residents told Business Insider what it’s like to live in such extreme temperatures.
Death Valley reached a scorching 130 degrees on an August 2020 afternoon. That’s 54 degrees Celsius, or roughly the internal temperature of a steak. By September 2022, Death Valley shattered the world record for the hottest temperature recorded in the month of September, hitting 126 degrees.
Record-setting or not, most days in July and August feel like you’re walking into an oven, said Brandi Stewart, a year-round Furnace Creek station resident and the public information officer for Death Valley National Park.
“It’s pretty oppressive,” Stewart said. “You go outside and you just immediately feel it, you feel it on your skin. It’s dry; you don’t feel yourself sweat because it evaporates so quickly.”
Death Valley’s 300 to 400 year-round residents experience highs of 110 to 125 degrees Fahrenheit throughout August. At night, temperatures dip into the low 90s. Yet despite the scorching heat, residents manage to work, socialize, and even exercise outside.
Stewart and Patrick Taylor, chief of interpretation and education for Death Valley National Park, told Business Insider what it’s like to live in one of the hottest places on Earth.
It takes time to get used to the heat
Taylor’s first summer in Death Valley was “pretty hard,” he said.
When a body isn’t adjusted to extreme heat, high temperatures can overwhelm it quickly, causing profuse sweating and exhaustion before worse outcomes like heat stroke. Most human bodies adapt after a few weeks, though, primarily by sweating more, reducing core temperatures, and altering blood vessels to increase blood flow to the skin.
Taylor estimates that it took him — and most others — about a year to adjust fully to Furnace Creek’s highs. He has now spent a total of seven years there.
“I don’t know if anyone actually enjoys it when it’s 125, but it’s not as intimidating,” he said.
Plus, Stewart said, Death Valley’s heat is dry, which means sweat evaporates quickly and cools the body more efficiently.
She knew she’d gotten accustomed to the heat, she said, after she started bundling up on 80-degree days.
“I’ve been on the phone with people today and yesterday, and they’ll say, ‘It’s 80 degrees outside and I’m wearing shorts and a T shirt,'” she said. But in that climate, Stewart added, “I’m probably wearing pants and a long sleeved shirt.”
Children host a bake sale at the Cow Creek complex.
Courtesy of Crystal Taylor
In the winter in Death Valley, highs hover in the 60s, while temperatures drop to the high 30s at night.
The Death Valley community stays close
Cow Creek, Timbisha Shoshone Village, and Stovepipe Wells, Death Valley’s three main year-round communities, are remote: The nearest town is an hour’s drive. Some local kids take the hour-long bus ride to school, though Taylor and his wife homeschool their five daughters.
The Cow Creek complex has about 80 housing units, most of which are within walking distance of one another, Taylor said. There’s a shared gym, playground, and county library. Most of the homes have two types of air conditioning: Ordinary A/C units and “swamp” or evaporative coolers, which take in dry, hot air and filter it through wet pads to cool it down.
But not all residents use both systems — or any cooling system at all.
“Some employees never ever use air conditioning,” Taylor said. “If it gets to 95 in the house, it gets to 95.”
He said they forgo air conditioning mostly to save money on utilities.
Most residents’ family members don’t like visiting in the summer, Taylor added, so year-rounders spend a lot of time together.
This branch of the National Park Service “tends to attract really motivated employees that wanna work hard and don’t run off when things are challenging,” he said.
The approximately 150 National Park Service employees in the area have set up community groups — “there’s a book club, a crafting club, people who like to go out running,” Taylor said.
Yes, Death Valley residents go running. Outside. Even in July.
“We’d never, ever tell a visitor to go running in Death Valley in the summer,” Taylor said. “But if you run every day and your body is used to running at 119 degrees, then 120 isn’t much of a difference.”
Residents take extra precautions when going outside
Brandi Stewart, a resident of Death Valley National Park, bakes cookies on her car’s windshield.
Brandi Stewart
In the summer, Death Valley’s heat makes even simple activities dangerous.
Taylor and his family never leave the house without a backup satellite phone, just in case they lose cell reception.
Stewart doesn’t drive to the grocery store without her boyfriend and a huge jug of water; she also inspects her car constantly to avoid the possibility that it breaks down, stranding her in a remote area.
“The biggest fear I have is getting a flat tire and having my vehicle malfunction,” she said.
Taylor and Stewart both said they tell visitors to the park that they must take similar precautions.
“A concern we have right now [is] that the attention we have to our heat records will bring more people out,” Stewart said.
Climate change is making life in Death Valley even tougher
The coronavirus pandemic has made it harder for the small group of Death Valley residents to gather, but they’re staying in touch via technology like everyone else.
“We’re all going through the same thing together; we’re all experiencing these high temperatures. It fosters this sense of community, that you’re going through this hard thing all together,” Stewart said.
They’re also facing another enormous threat: climate change.
In Death Valley, six of the 10 hottest months on record have occurred in the last 20 years. In July 2018, the area set a world record for hottest month ever recorded, with average temperatures of 108.1 degrees Fahrenheit — breaking its previous record of 107.4 degrees the year before.
Taylor said the temperature changes have made it harder to connect with fellow residents.
“When we look at our trends over the last decade or so, [Sunday] aside, it doesn’t seem like generally the daytime highs are noticeably higher than they’ve been historically. The big trend is the overnight lows,” he said.
Ten years ago, Death Valley’s average low temperature in August was 86 degrees, according to NOAA. Last year, it was 90. In the same time frame, average low temperatures in September have increased from 74 to 80.
“We used to go out and play at night, and now we can’t go out and socialize as much as we used to,” Taylor said. “Maybe before, we’d have a barbecue; now it’s too hot to do that four months out of the year instead of one month.”
